Technology or method
Antibiotics
Drugs that kill bacteria or stop their growth. Penicillin traces back to Fleming's 1929 report of a mold that stopped bacteria growing.
Antimicrobial resistance
Microbes evolving to survive drugs meant to kill them. Bacterial resistance was associated with an estimated 4.95 million deaths in 2019.Source: WHOSource: GRAM Collaborators, 2022Source: CDC, 2025
Step 6 of 8ReadingProcess
How Antimicrobial resistance connects
Antimicrobial resistance is selected for by
Antimicrobial resistance is an example of
Process
Natural selection
Individuals better suited to their surroundings leave more offspring, so their inherited traits become more common. Darwin's finches and peppered moths are well-studied examples.
Antimicrobial resistance is related to
Technology or method
Phage therapy
Treating bacterial infections with viruses that infect bacteria, an approach being studied again as drug resistance grows.
Emerging researchOpen in Microbe Lab
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Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
Antimicrobial resistance (fact sheet) (opens the original in a new tab)
World Health Organization. who.int. World Health Organization.
Fact sheetIntergovernmental sourceGlobal burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis (opens the original in a new tab)
Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators (2022). The Lancet 399:629-655.
Modelled estimate: 1.27 million deaths directly attributable to bacterial AMR in 2019.
Peer-reviewedSystematic analysisAbout Antimicrobial Resistance (opens the original in a new tab)
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2025). cdc.gov. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Published 2025-01-31.
Fact sheetGovernment source