Scientists are recruiting live bacteria to fight deadly infections
The state of Odisha (formerly Orissa) in southeast India is perhaps not the first place you’d expect to find a clinical trial for a next-generation drug with the potential to save half a billion lives. A largely agrarian province, over 80 percent of Odisha’s inhabitants live in small, rural communities and earn, on average, $1.50 a day. Consequently the state has a higher-than-average mortality rate, and an infant mortality rate of 65 per 1,000 live births, double the world average.
And yet, from 2008 to 2012, 4,500 women and their newborns there participated in a potentially game-changing study testing a new treatment for infant sepsis – a study whose recently published results just might hold the key to a post-antibiotic future.