Wendy and George Gould were supposed to grow old together.
The couple found each other on a dating website when they were in their 40s. To Wendy’s delight, George met all her criteria: he was kind, funny, and most importantly, he still believed in Santa Claus. They were goofy best friends who didn’t want to grow up, but if they had to, they’d do it side by side.
But Wendy says that future was ripped away from them when George contracted a drug-resistant superbug at a Vancouver hospital in 2016. He had undergone two surgeries to treat his stage-four colorectal cancer and was supposed to resume chemotherapy, but his wife says the infection ravaged his already fragile body and left him too weak to continue treatment.
During the final 18 months of his life, he was admitted to hospital 22 times for intravenous antibiotics that triggered violent nausea and, on some occasions, frightening hallucinations, she says. He became so thin that his skin looked stretched over his bones, and she says the 58-year-old father died in an isolation unit.
Canadian Press reporters travelled to South Africa and India to investigate the growing epidemic of drug resistance, which experts describe as the single greatest threat to human health on the planet. This is the first story of a six-part series exploring how the unfettered use of antibiotics pushes humanity closer to a post-antibiotic era in which common infections may be impossible to treat. The R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship helped fund the project