In Season 6 of ThrowForward Thursday, we are revisiting some of our previous predictions and finding out what’s happening in the world right now. This one is scary.
In Episode 66: The End of Antibiotics, we talked about the end of antibiotics. Just this past month, in October 2025, the World Health Organization released a research report on antibiotic and AMR resistance, and it’s getting worse and worse, see here.
We need to urgently use fewer antibiotics, giving science a chance to keep up with the mutations of the diseases we are fighting. We need to think not just about “quick fixes” for our own illnesses, but more societally and systemically about healthcare.
TRANSCRIPT
What would happen if our medicines stopped working? If illnesses that today feel fairly easy to deal with could become death sentences in the future?
My name is Graeme Codrington. This is ThrowForward Thursday, and yes, sorry, this is one of those weeks where we need to raise some alarm bells. Back in episode 66, we had a look at the end of antibiotics. We were doing a series about things that we take for granted today, which might come to an end, and we had a look at the issue of antibiotics dealing with bacterial issues in our bodies. And the fact that many of the bacterial infections that we get are actually mutating beyond the ability of normal and well-used antibiotics.
In October of 2025, the World Health Organisation put out a press release. I’ll link to in the show notes and the comments so you can go and read it for yourself. But it is very alarming. In the last five years, we have seen antibiotic resistance increase by 40 %, or it’s actually about a 15 % increase every year, to now a total of 40 % of lab-tested bacterial infections not responding to our current antibiotics.
That’s an incredibly high number, and if you go a step further and look at all AMRs, antimicrobial resistance, and that includes fungus and viruses and so on, we see a similar trend, a trend when nature itself and the diseases and pathogens in nature mutating beyond the ability of science to keep up.
This is something we have to take very, very seriously. We give out too many antibiotics, we are too quick to rush to pharmaceutical solutions. This is not one of those conspiracy theory videos where I’m saying that pharmaceutical companies are doing the wrong thing and are trying to make the world worse. I don’t believe that. But doctors and us as people, we are too quick to just pop the pills. It’s a quick solution for a problem that we know we have a solution for, but we are not thinking. societally, we are not thinking. Biger picture and longer term.
And it’s very likely that within the next 5 to 10 years, we will have serious issues that previously we knew how to deal with, but now our medicines no longer work. We obviously need a massive investment in scientific advance. The AI tech bros are promising us that AI will speed up some of the research in medicine, I truly hope that they are right. I’m not sure I believe it myself. But anyway, let me not be too sceptical about that. If it works, it works, and that will be fantastic.
We also need the medical fraternity to begin to talk about this more, and we need local doctors, GPs, and ourselves to be a little bit more careful to only take antibiotics when we really really need them. And maybe we’ll just take that extra sick day off to let our bodies naturally recover.
Yeah, the future is coming faster than we thought it would even three years ago. Here in Season 6 of ThrowForward Thursday, we’re updating some of what we have already been predicting, and sadly, in this case, we’re finding it’s even worse than we thought.
Please join me next week in the ThrowForward Thursday studio. Promise we’ll choose something a little bit more upbeat as we look at the future again.
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For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.