The Short: Everyone

The Long: Some people are more vulnerable to infection than others, but even ‘healthy’ people without underlying diseases can develop a resistant infection through everyday events, for example, a cut whilst gardening, a cat scratch, or occasionally a routine operation leads to a resistant infection.

Drug resistant infections can happen to any person at any time and the best way to guard against this is through mitigating the development of drug resistant bugs in the first place.

Antibiotics are used across medicine – from routine knee operations, or injuries that break the skin, Caesarean sections, transplants, burns, urinary tract infections (UTIs), or controlling infections in cancer patients who often lose their natural ability to fight infection due to chemotherapy.

Without them, many surgeries and treatments would be plunged back into the dark ages of a pre-antibiotic era when people died of seemingly minor scratches or grazes.1

References:
1.Antibiotic Research UK, https://www.antibioticresearch.org.uk/ Accessed April 2024.