THE TIMES | In the 30 years that Dr Neil Todd has worked as a clinical microbiologist, he has watched as the number of antibiotics available to treat patients has grown fewer. In some cases — such as when patients arrive at hospital with sepsis — he is down to his last resort. “We’re now scraping the bottom of the barrel of the drugs we’ve got that we can use that way,” he said. “Once you get to about a 10 per cent resistance rate of an antibiotic, it becomes a bit of a gamble to give it to somebody with sepsis.”