Imagine a future where the drugs we rely on to cure common yet life-threatening infections don’t work on most people. Now imagine a right-wing regime that only gives the medicine that still works to “productive” citizens. That’s right: millions of people would be screwed.
Widespread antibiotic resistance is the looming medical apocalypse most people are too scared to think about. It’s simple science: as antibiotics get used more and more, the germs they treat will mutate to become increasingly immune to them. Written and created by scientist/filmmaker Sara Kenney, drawn by John Watkiss and edited by Karen Berger, the influential founding editor of DC’s Vertigo imprint, Surgeon X happens in a near-future where that nightmare comes to pass. and main character Rosa Scott goes off the grid to set up a speakeasy surgical practice and use untested experimental drugs to try and save lives.
In the exclusive preview below, Sara takes in a lecture by her twin sister that details the history of antibiotics.
You can get a glimpse of just how hopeless the series’ world-to-come looks, which gets rendered in more darkly satirical detail in Surgeon X #1, out on September 28 from Image Comics.
DISCUSSION
This would be bad, of course, but how is it apocalyptic? This is what the world world was like only 80 years ago, in the pre-penicillin era. There would be a big uptick in a lot of nasty diseases, but other public health successes like the elimination of polio and smallpox, near elimination of malaria, and general improvement in water quality would still remain. We would talking bad flu outbreaks, not Ebola apocalypse.