Antibiotics are an effective means of treating bacterial contamination. But extensive use of antibiotic substances in medicine and agriculture has resulted in increasingly antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that humanity is approaching the post-antibiotic era – a world in which antibiotics will no longer be effective, and even minute contaminations will be life threatening.
Now, encouraging research that combines metals and organic acids as a viable alternative to antibiotics is being conducted at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The findings by a team led by Assistant Professor Oded Lewinson in the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine were recently published in Nature Scientific Reports.