When Superbugs Strike Back
Every pill tells a story. Some save lives. Some teach bacteria to fight. In their new book, A World of Resistance: India and the Global Antibiotic Crisis (Harvard 2026), Professor Assa Doron (ANU School of Culture, History & Language) and Professor Alex Broom (University of Sydney) track antibiotics across India, revealing a hidden pressures that collide across medicine, markets, and infrastructure —and superbugs emerge, multiply and spread well beyond India. For Doron, this story first became visible in India’s waterways, where effluent from drug production—laced with antibiotics—flows like a liquid fingerprint of modern medicine. What should have been a miracle for humanity was spilling into rivers, markets, and communities, nudging bacteria to evolve in ways humans didn’t anticipate.
The book grew out of an ARC-funded collaboration that combined Doron’s research on sanitation and environmental contamination with Broom’s expertise in clinical antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Together, they traced antibiotics far beyond clinics—from pharmacies and households to factory farms and rivers—uncovering how human systems inadvertently arm microbes for the next outbreak. “For years, we’ve focused on antibiotic misuse,” Doron says. “But the deeper question is why antibiotics have become so necessary to begin with.”
Antibiotics were meant to be lifesavers, yet they have become hard to digest. Overuse and structural pressures have turned medicine’s everyday miracles into an emergency, one that is already reshaping medicine, agriculture, and public health, while exposing inequalities of the contemporary world. Doron and Broom show that resistance is not just about microbes adapting—it is also about how our economic, fragile healthcare, and food and trade systems are organised. India makes this especially visible because of the intensity and scale of the problem. But the AMR crisis is global; it is not confined to India or the subcontinent.
The book has already sent ripples through Science, one of the world’s most influential journals—a rare recognition for a social-science perspective. “It is heartening to see a social science book—one that foregrounds the social, political, and infrastructural dimensions of the problem—taken seriously in one of the field’s leading scientific journals,” Doron says. Aeon, a publication renowned the world over academically for its quality and rigorous editorial standards, has also captured the essence of the book in an essay titled The antibiotic trap, which can also be listened to as an audio feature.
Looking ahead, Doron hopes the book sparks a less technocratic conversation, one attentive to culture, inequality, and the hidden costs of cheap drugs and meat. “Too often resistance is cast as a technical problem of hospitals and clinics,” he says. “But AMR is bound up with far larger concerns: polluted waterways, overcrowded farms, uneven health systems, precarious labour, and global supply chains. If the book helps encourage research that treats AMR holistically and moves the burden of explanation away from individual behaviour towards systems, corporate responsibility, and governance, that would be a real step forward.”
The book also emphasizes the everyday reliance on antibiotics—how people, communities, and industries lean on them to compensate for fragile systems. By following the drugs across diverse domains, Doron and Broom reveal how medicine, markets, and infrastructure converge to create conditions where resistance thrives, highlighting the social and political dimensions that are too often overlooked in purely clinical research.
In A World of Resistance: India and the Global Antibiotic Crisis (Harvard 2026), readers confront the double-edged sword of modern medicine: lifesaving drugs losing their power, systems built on antibiotic dependence, and a global crisis with no easy fix—a bitter pill to swallow.