Antimicrobial resistance in conflict zones

For the last few weeks, the news has been dominated by the situation in the Middle East. Joining Claudia Hammond is BBC Health Correspondent James Gallagher who speaks with Dr Antoine Abou Fayad, a microbiologist and medicinal chemist based in Beirut, Lebanon. He reveals that war, just like the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, provides the perfect storm to accelerate the spread of multidrug-resistant infections. And nobody is safe. Following the recent meningitis B outbreak in the UK which has killed two people and led to the rollout of vaccines and preventative antibiotics, Claudia and James discuss how meningitis outbreaks are dealt with in the ‘meningitis belt’ - an area stretching across 26 sub-Saharan African countries and talk about a new vaccine aiming to stop deadly meningitis epidemics which has been confirmed to be safe following analysis of vaccination campaigns in Nigeria and Niger. And India's snakebite crisis is killing near sixty thousand people every year, about six people every hour. Journalist Chhavi Sachdev joins us to discuss the progress of India’s National Action Plan to tackle snakebite envenoming which launched two years ago. Also, what time of day do you exercise? Well, a new study using Fitbit-derived heart rate data has found that people who regularly exercised early in the morning were significantly less likely to have coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes or obesity compared with people who exercised later in the day. Presenter: Claudia Hammond Producer: Jonathan Blackwell

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Antimicrobial resistance in conflict zones is an episode from Health Check by BBC.

This episode is 26:28 long.

This episode was published on Mar 25, 2026.

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