Fattened Calves and Educated Microbes: the political history of agriculture and anti-microbial resistance

Body Politics: where history, medicine and society collide

Over the past seventy years, antibiotics have become one of the world's most prominent and powerful technologies for reducing human suffering through infectious diseases. Some historians have even gone as far to describe this period as the 'antibiotic era'. However, in the early twenty-first century, the progressive promises of antibiotics have come under existential threat, through the ability of bacteria to become resistant to them. This problem, known as Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR), has in consequence come to be seen as one of the existential threats to human civilisation in the next few decades, second only to climate change and ecological collapse. How did this troubling transition occur? With "guest" appearances from David Attenborough and Alexander Fleming, and in conversation with one of the world's leading authorities on the history of AMR, the historian Claas Kirchhelle, this episode offers an answer: through the industrial use of antibiotics in agriculture around the world in the decades after the Second World War.