5 days Ago
Nikolaos Komilionis was 66, and on holiday in Greece, when he was admitted to hospital for minor surgery. It should have been a simple procedure, but after picking up a superbug that was resistant to antibiotics, he was soon fighting for his life. “It was very traumatising,” says his daughter, Noula Settinelli, who went to Greece four times over the next six months as her father underwent multiple operations in three hospitals after rupturing his bowel due to infection.
“The doctors said he died 14 times in all the surgeries they did to repair his large intestine, and he came back, they revived him.” The WHO has warned of the world entering a post-antibiotic era, in which the drugs that we have come to rely on are far less effective. Credit: Pfizer Finally, Komilionis was stable enough to be airlifted to Australia.
But his ordeal was far from over. He ended up in isolation in Melbourne’s Austin hospital, with numerous abscesses in his abdomen, and superbugs in both his bowel and in the abscesses. Doctors failed to find a drug that could kill the bugs, so they proposed a cure that dated back to a time before antibiotics: they would remove his large intestine.
The chances of survival were 50-50, doctors told the family. “But if we didn’t do it, he was going to die,” Settinelli says. Thankfully, the operation was a success.
Today, Komilionis is 78 years old and walks 15 kilometres a day. “He is labelled superman,” Settinelli says. But things could easily have gone the other way.
And cases like this are expected to become far more common. A global threat.
