Can photocatalytic materials combat AMR
Spectrum Blue explores the historical resistance to innovation in medicine, drawing parallels with the current challenge of antimicrobial resistance and the potential of new technologies like photocatalytic materials to address it. We like to think of innovation as inevitable. In reality, it is often resisted, especially when it asks us to act on what we cannot see. The discovery of germ theory In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis was working in the maternity wards of the Vienna General Hospital, where two nearly identical clinics produced very different outcomes. In one, staffed by physicians and medical students, women frequently died from puerperal fever. In the other, run by midwives, mortality was significantly lower. The discrepancy was persistent and unexplained. The turning point came after the death of Semmelweis’s colleague, Jakob Kolletschka, who developed a fatal infection following a scalpel injury during an autopsy. The symptoms closely resembled those of the women dying in the clinic. Semmelweis drew a connection that others had not: material from cadavers, carried on the hands of physicians, was somehow causing disease. Without …
