India, Nov. 8 -- "The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant."

That was Alexander Fleming, speaking the year he won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, in 1945.

We are living in the world he warned of.

As of 2023, one in six bacterial infections causing common diseases was resistant to existing antibiotic treatments, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported, last month. In 2019, nearly 5 million deaths were linked to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the report states.

"Antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine," WHO directo...