It is by now no secret that the human species is locked in a race of its own making with “superbugs.” Indeed, if popular science fiction is a measure of awareness, the theme has pervaded English-language literature from Michael Crichton’s 1969 Andromeda Strain all the way to Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 Station Eleven and beyond. By a combination of massive inadvertence and what can only be called stupidity, we must now invent new and effective antibiotics faster than deadly bacteria evolve—and regrettably, they are rapidly doing so with our help. I do not exclude the possibility that bad actors might deliberately engineer deadly superbugs.¹ But even if that does not happen, humanity faces an existential threat largely of its own making in the absence of malign intentions.

As threats go, this one is entirely predictable. The concept of a “black swan,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s term for low-probability but high-impact events, has become widely known in recent years. Taleb did not invent the concept; he only gave it a catchy name to help mainly business executives who know little of statistics or probability. Many have embraced the “black swan” label the way children embrace holiday gifts, which are often bobbles of little value, except to them. But the threat of inadvertent pandemics is not a “black swan” because its probability is not low. If one likes catchy labels, it better fits the term “gray rhino,” which, explains Michele Wucker, is a high-probability, high-impact event that people manage to ignore anyway for a raft of social-psychological reasons.² A pandemic is a quintessential gray rhino, for it is no longer a matter of if but of when it will challenge us—and of how prepared we are to deal with it when it happens.

We have certainly been warned. The curse we have created was understood as a possibility from the very outset, when seventy years ago Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, predicted antibiotic resistance. When interviewed for a 2015 article, “The Most Predictable Disaster in the History of the Human Race, ” Bill Gates pointed out that one of the costliest disasters of the 20^th century, worse even than World War I, was the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. As the author of the article, Ezra Klein, put it: “No one can say we weren’t warned. And warned. And warned. A pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.”³

Even with effective new medicines, if we can devise them, we must contain outbreaks of bacterial disease fast, lest they get out of control. In other words, we have a social-organizational challenge before us as well as a strictly medical one. That means getting sufficient amounts of medicine into the right hands and in the right places, but it also means educating people and enabling them to communicate with each other to prevent any outbreak from spreading widely.

Responsible governments and cooperative organizations have options in that regard, but even individuals can contribute something. To that end, as a medical doctor I have created a computer app that promises to be useful in that regard—of which more in a moment. But first let us review the situation, for while it has become well known to many people, there is a general resistance to acknowledging the severity and imminence of the danger.

What Are the Problems?

Bacteria are among the oldest living things on the planet. They are masters of survival and can be found everywhere. Billions of them live on and in every one of us, many of them helping our bodies to run smoothly and stay healthy. Most bacteria that are not helpful to us are at least harmless, but some are not. They invade our cells, spread quickly, and cause havoc that we refer to generically as disease.

Millions of people used to die every year as a result of bacterial infections, until we developed antibiotics. These wonder drugs revolutionized medicine, but one can have too much of a good thing. Doctors have used antibiotics recklessly, prescribing them for just about everything, and in the process helped to create strains of bacteria that are resistant to the medicines we have. We even give antibiotics to cattle that are not sick and use them to fatten chickens. Companies large and small still mindlessly market antimicrobial products for hands and home, claiming that they kill bacteria and viruses. They do more harm than good because the low concentrations of antimicrobials that these products contain tend to kill friendly bacteria (not viruses at all), and so clear the way for the mass multiplication of surviving unfriendly bacteria. Perhaps even worse, hospitals have deployed antimicrobial products on an industrial scale for a long time now, the result being a sharp rise in iatrogenic bacterial illnesses.

Overuse of antibiotics and commercial products containing them has helped superbugs to evolve. We now increasingly face microorganisms that cannot be killed by antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, or any other chemical weapon we throw at them. Pandemics are the major risk we run as a result, but it is not the only one. Overuse of antibiotics by doctors, homemakers, and hospital managers could mean that, in the not-too-distant future, something as simple as a minor cut could again become life-threatening if it becomes infected. Few non-medical professionals are aware that antibiotics are the foundation on which nearly all of modern medicine rests. Cancer therapy, organ transplants, surgeries minor and major, and even childbirth all rely on antibiotics to prevent infections. If infections become untreatable we stand to lose most of the medical advances we have made over the past fifty years.

And the problem is already here. In the summer of 2011, a 43-year-old woman with complications from a lung transplant was transferred from a New York City hospital to the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Bethesda, Maryland. She had a highly resistant superbug known as Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC). The patient was treated and eventually discharged after doctors concluded that they had contained the infection. A few weeks later, a 34-year-old man with a tumor and no known link to the woman contracted KPC while at the hospital. During the course of the next few months, several more NIH patients presented with KPC.

Doctors attacked the outbreak with combinations of antibiotics, including a supposedly powerful experimental drug. A separate intensive care unit for KPC patients was set up and robots disinfected empty rooms, but the infection still spread beyond the intensive care area. Several patients died and then suddenly all was silent on the KPC front, with doctors convinced they had seen the last of the dangerous bacterium. They couldn’t have been more mistaken. A year later, a young man with complications from a bone marrow transplant arrived at NIH. He became infected with KPC and died. This superbug is now present in hospitals in most, if not all U.S. states. This is not good.

This past year an outbreak of CRE (carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae) linked to contaminated medical equipment infected 11 patients and killed two in Los Angeles area hospitals. This family of bacteria has evolved resistance to all antibiotics, including the powerful carbapenem antibiotics that are often used as a last resort against serious infections. They are now so resilient that it is virtually impossible to remove them from medical tools such as catheters and breathing tubes placed into the body, even after cleaning.

Then we have gonorrhea, chlamydia, and other sexually transmitted diseases that we cannot treat and that are spreading all over the world. Anyone who has sex can catch these infections, and because most people may not exhibit any symptoms they spread infections without anyone knowing about it. Sexually transmitted diseases used to be treatable with antibiotics, but in recent years we have witnessed the rise of multi-drug resistant STDs. Untreated gonorrhea can lead to infertility in men and women and blindness and other congenital defect in babies. As is well known, too, we have witnessed many cases of drug-resistant pneumonia.

These problems have arisen in part because of simple mistakes healthcare professionals repeatedly make. Let me explain.

Neither superbugs nor common bacterial infections produce any special symptoms indicative of their cause. Rashes, fevers, sneezing, runny noses, ear pain, diarrhea, vomiting, coughing, fatigue, and weakness are signs of common and minor illnesses as well as uncommonly deadly ones. Therefore, the major problem for clinicians is to identify a common symptom that may potentially be an early sign of a major infection that could result in an epidemic.

We know that dangerous infections in any given geographical area do not start at the same time. They start with one victim and gradually spread. But that victim is only one among hundreds of patients a doctor will typically see, so many doctors will miss patients presenting with infections that are serious. They will probably identify diseases that kill fast, but slow-spreading infections such as skin infections that can lead to septicemia are rarely diagnosed early. In addition, I have seen doctors treating eczema with antibiotic cream, even though they know that bacteria are resistant to the majority of these drugs. This sort of action encourages simple infections to spread locally, because patients are therefore not instructed to take other, more useful precautions. On top of that, some people are frivolous about infections and assume doctors are exaggerating the threat.

And some people are selfish. Once I was called to see a passenger during a flight who had symptoms consistent with infection. He boarded the plane with these symptoms, but began to feel much worse during the flight. I was scared, knowing how infections such as Ebola can spread. This made me think about a way to screen passengers before they board a flight. Airlines could refund a traveler’s ticket, or issue a replacement, in case of sickness—which is not the policy now. We currently have no method to block infectious travelers from boarding flights, and there are no changes in the incentive system to enable conscientious passengers to avoid losing their money if they responsibly miss a flight because of illness.

Speaking of selfishness, I once saw a mother drop her daughter off at school with a serious bout of impetigo on her face. When I asked her why she had brought her daughter to school with a contagious infection, she said she could not spare the time to keep her at home or take her to the doctor. By allowing this child to contact other children, a simple infection can become a major threat. Fortunately, I could see the rash on the girl’s face, but other kids in schools may have rashes we cannot see. Incorrect diagnosis of skin problems and mistaken use of antibiotics to treat them is common all over the world, and so we are continually creating superbugs in our communities.

Similarly, chest infections, sore throats, and illnesses diagnosed as colds that unnecessarily treated with antibiotics are also a major threat. By prescribing antibiotics for viral infections, we are not only helping bacteria develop resistance, but we are also polluting the environment when these drugs are passed in urine and feces. All of this helps resistant bacteria to spread in the community and become an epidemic.

Ebola is very difficult to transmit because people who are contagious have visible and unusual symptoms. However, the emerging infections and pandemics of the future may not have visible symptoms, and they could break out in highly populous countries such as India and China that send thousands of travelers all over the world every day.

When a person is infected with a contagious disease, he or she can expect to pass the illness on to an average of two people. This is called the “reproduction number.” Two is not that high a number as these things go; some diseases have far greater rates of infection. The SARS virus had a reproduction number of four. Measles has a reproduction number of 18. One person traveling as an airplane passenger and carrying an infection similar to Ebola can infect three to five people sitting nearby, ten if he or she walks to the toilet. The study that highlighted this was published in a medical journal a few years ago, but the airline industry has not implemented any changes or introduced screening to prevent the spread of infections by air travel passengers, a major vehicle for the rapid spread of disease.

It is scary to think that nobody knows what will happen when the world faces a lethal disease we’re not used to, perhaps with a reproduction number of five or eight or even ten. What if it starts in a megacity? What if, unlike Ebola, it’s contagious before patients show obvious symptoms? Past experience isn’t comforting. In 2009, H1N1 flu spread around the world before we even knew it existed.

The Questions Remains

Why do seemingly intelligent people repeatedly do such collectively stupid things? How did we allow this to happen? The answer is disarmingly simple. It is because people are incentivized to prioritize short-term benefits over long-term considerations. It is what social scientists have called a “logic of collective action” problem. Everyone has his or her specialized niche interest: doctors their patients’ approval, business and airline executives their shareholders’ earnings, hospitals their reputations for best-practice hygienics, homemakers their obligation to keep their own families from illness. But no one owns the longer-term consequences for hundreds of millions of people who are irrelevant to satisfying these short-term concerns.

Here is an example. At a recent Superbug Super Drug conference in London that I attended, scientists, health agencies, and pharmaceutical companies were vastly more concerned with investing millions of dollars in efforts to invent another antibiotic, claiming that this has to be the way forward. Money was the most pressing issue because, as everyone at the conference knew, for many years pharmaceutical companies have been pulling back from antibiotics research because they can’t see a profit in it. Development costs run into billions of dollars, yet there is no guarantee that any new drug will successfully fight infections.

At the same conference Dr. Lloyd Czaplewski spoke about alternatives to antibiotics, in case we cannot come up with new ones fast enough to outrun superbug evolution. But he omitted mention of preventive strategies that use the internet or communication software to help reduce the spread of infections among families, communities, and countries. It is madness that we don’t have a concrete second-best alternative to new antibiotics, because we need them and we need them quickly.

Of course, this is why we have governments, which have been known occasionally in the past as commonwealths. Governments are supposed to look out for the wider, common interests of society that niche-interested professionals take no responsibility for, and that includes public health. It is why nearly every nation’s government has an official who is analogous to the U.S. Surgeon General, and nearly every one has a public health service of some kind.

Alas, national governments do not always function as they should. Several years ago physician and former Republican Senator Bill Frist submitted a proposal to the Senate for a U.S. Medical Expeditionary Corps. This would have been a specialized organization that could coordinate and execute rapid responses to global health emergencies such as Ebola. Nothing came of it, because Dr. Frist’s fellow politicians were either too shortsighted or too dimwitted to understand why it was a good idea. Or perhaps they simply realized that they could not benefit politically from supporting it.

Plenty of mistakes continue to be made. In 2015, a particularly infectious form of bird flu ripped through 14 U.S. states, leading farmers to preventively slaughter nearly 40 million birds. The result of such callous and unnecessary acts is that, instead of exhausting themselves in the host population of birds, the viruses quickly find alternative hosts in which to survive, and could therefore easily mutate into a form that can infect humans.

Earlier, during the 1980s, AIDS garnered more public attention because a handful of rich and famous people were infected, and because the campaign to eradicate it dovetailed with and boosted the political campaign on behalf of homosexual rights. Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in hospitals, by far the bigger threat at the time, was virtually ignored. Some doctors knew that MRSA would bring us to our knees and kill millions of people worldwide, but pharmaceutical companies and device and equipment manufacturers ignored these doctors and the thousands of patients dying in hospitals as a result of MRSA. They prioritized the wrong thing, and government did not correct the error. And that is partly how antibiotic-resistant infection went from an obscure hospital problem to an incipient global pandemic.

Politics well outside the United States plays several other roles in the budding problem that we are confronting. Countries often will not admit they have a problem and request help because of the possible financial implications in terms of investment and travel. Guinea did not declare the Ebola epidemic early on and Chinese leaders, worried about trade and tourism, lied for months in 2002 about the presence of the SARS virus. In 2004, when avian influenza first surfaced in Thailand, officials there displayed a similar reluctance to release information.

Hospitals in some countries, including India, are managed and often owned by doctors. They refuse to share information about existing infections and often categorically deny they have a problem. Reporting infections to public health authorities is not mandatory, and so hospitals that fail to say anything are not penalized. Even now, the WHO and the CDC do not have accurate and up-to-date information about the spread of E. coli or other infections, and part of the reason is that for-profit hospitals are reluctant to do anything to diminish their bottom line.

Syria and Yemen are among those countries that are so weak and fragmented that they cannot effectively coordinate public healthcare. But their governments are also hostile to external organizations that offer relief. Part of the reason is xenophobia, but part is that this makes the government look bad. Relatedly, most poor-nation governments do not trust the efficacy of international institutions, and think that cooperating with them amounts to a re-importation of imperialism. They would rather their own people suffer and die than ask for needed help.

That brings us to the level of international public health governance. Alas, sometimes poor-country governments estimate the efficacy of international institutions accurately. The WHO’s Ebola response in 2014-15 was a disaster. The organization was slow to declare a public health emergency even after public warnings from Médecins Sans Frontières, some of whose doctors had already died on the front line. The outbreak killed more than 28,000 people, far more than would have been the case had it been quickly identified.

This isn’t just an issue of bureaucratic incompetence. The WHO is under-resourced for the problems it is meant to solve. Funding comes from voluntary donations, and there is no mechanism by which it can quickly scale up its efforts during an emergency. The result is that its response to the next major disease outbreak is likely to be as inadequate as were its responses to Ebola, H1N1, and SARS.

Stakeholders admit that we need another mechanism, and most experts agree that the world needs some kind of emergency response team for dangerous diseases. But no one knows how to set one up amid the dysfunctional global governance structures that presently exist. Maybe they should turn to Bill Frist, whose basic concept was sound; if the U.S. government will not act, perhaps some other governments will, and use the UN system to do so. But as things stand, we lack a health equivalent of the military reserve. Neither government leaders nor doctors can mobilize a team of experts to contain infections. People who want to volunteer, whether for government or NGO efforts, are not paid and the rules, if any, are sketchy about what we do with them when they return from a mission. Are employers going to take them back? What are the quarantine rules? It is all completely ad hoc, meaning that humanity lacks the tools it needs to protect itself.

And note, by the way, the contrast between how governments prepare for facing pandemics and how they prepare for making war. War is not more deadly to the human race than pandemics, but national defense against armed aggression is much better planned for than defense against threats to public health. There is a wealth of rules regarding it, too. Human beings study and plan for war, which kills people both deliberately and accidentally, but they do not invest comparable effort planning for pandemics, which are liable to kill orders of magnitude more people. To the mind of a medical doctor, this is strange.

Creating Conditions for Infections to Spread

Superbug infections spread for several interlocking reasons. Some are medical-epidemiological. Most of the infections of the past thirty years have started in one place and in one family. As already noted, they spread because many infectious diseases are highly contagious before the onset of symptoms, and because it is difficult to prevent patients who know they are sick from going to hospitals, work, and school, or from traveling further afield.

But again, one reason for the problem is political, not medical. Many governments have no strategies in place to prevent pandemics because they are unwilling to tell their people how infections spread. They don’t want to worry people with such talk; it will make them, they fear, unpopular. So governments may have mountains of bureaucracy with great heaps of rules and regulations concerning public health, but they are generally unwilling to trust their own citizens to use common sense on their own behalf. This, too, seems very strange.

Until now, no one has come forward to help us develop strategies to educate people how to identify and prevent the spread of infection to their families and communities. The majority of stakeholders have also been oblivious to the use of new technologies to help reduce the spread of these infections. There are some exceptions. In a fun blog post called Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse, the CDC uses the threat of a zombie outbreak as a metaphor to encourage people to prepare for emergencies, including pandemics. It is well meaning and insightful, yet when my colleagues and I try to discuss ways of scaling up the CDC’s example with doctors and nurses, they shut down. Nobody plans for an actual crisis partly because it is too scary and hence paralyzing to think about. But it is also because it is not most health professionals’ job; it is not what they are trained and paid to do. It is always someone else’s job, except that it has turned out to be nobody’s job.

Worse, the situation is not static. While we sit paralyzed, superbugs are evolving. Epidemiological models now predict how an algorithmic process of disease spread will move through the modern world. All urban centers around the entire globe can become infected within sixty days because we move around and cross borders much more than our ancestors did, thanks to air travel. A new pandemic could start crossing borders before we even know it exists. A flu-like disease could kill more than 33 million people in 250 days.³

Dr MAYA to the Rescue

All is not lost; there is at least some good news. Scientists can now rapidly decode the basic structure and pathways of most new diseases in ways that were unimaginable even a few decades ago. But even a much more rapid response must still rely on patients coming forward to say they have a symptom that may require investigation and treatment. We know from past experience that patients with serious symptoms are often in denial and ignore them until it’s too late; they avoid seeking help from doctors because they do not want their fears confirmed.

But we can conquer this problem, and we can do it without requiring the top-to-bottom reform of public health infrastructures that would take many years. I have developed a simple method to help people share information about symptoms, and it uses communication technology to monitor what’s going on and to offer advice and treatment. Under my system, emergency operation centers, infectious disease control centers, and doctors are all informed after clusters of similar symptoms have been identified. This will help mobilize services to isolate infected individuals and prevent them from traveling to healthcare centers or hospital emergency rooms, thus spreading their infection to healthcare workers and the population at large.

Also, by enabling doctors to create a database of symptoms using their local language, we can protect healthcare workers and the general public. We have spent years developing and testing a tool that is easy to use and inexpensive to implement. Our hypothesis is simple: We must immediately stop over-using strong combinations of antibiotics and broad-spectrum antibiotics and instead focus on preventing infections from spreading locally.

My innovation, the free Dr MAYA app, can identify infected individuals early, manage basic healthcare, lower patient anxiety, and reduce consultation time, thereby stopping the spread of infection.

I originally created MAYA (Medical Advice You Access) to help receptionists and nurses in nurse-led clinics, walk-in clinics, and emergency after-hours services to differentiate merely unwell from seriously unwell patients—and to refer the latter to doctors or hospitals, if required. But the technology now allows us to do much more. Through the Dr MAYA mobile phone application, we can develop a monitoring system that identifies clusters of infections in hospitals, communities, towns, and even entire countries. Preventing patients with contagious diseases from visiting accident and emergency departments or clinics will protect the lives of doctors, nurses, and the general population. Hospitals must use Dr MAYA as a gatekeeper to prevent pandemics from occurring.

So how does it work in practice? Let’s imagine that a person is feeling ill, and obviously he wants to know what is wrong with him. So he logs into the system where he enters his symptoms, just as you might call a medical receptionist to explain why you needs an appointment. Dr MAYA then evaluates the symptoms and advises the patient based on medical knowledge and experience. It does not give an ad hoc answer like many receptionists do, but responds using a database composed of medical information.

Patients will be directed not to call a doctor if the Dr MAYA system suggests they should instead go to a pharmacist or a nurse, or directly to a hospital. That will reduce time-wasting consultations for non-threatening symptoms like warts, athlete’s foot, allergic rashes, or fungal infections. Patients will be advised to call emergency numbers if their symptoms are very serious but non-infectious. If the symptoms do indicate an infection, Dr MAYA will inform local infectious disease units to prevent the person from traveling and infecting others. Only patients who require clinical examination or specific tests will be advised to book an appointment, thus reducing emergency appointments by about 80 percent and allowing doctors to focus their time and expertise on patients who truly require face-to-face consultations.

By using Dr MAYA, patients will be able to access specialist information provided by their own doctor and communicate with healthcare professionals 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They can make appointments, arrange video consultations, send emails, and receive prescriptions. Dr MAYA can also be linked to hospital management systems, and we can help to digitize and systemize healthcare in hospitals, clinics, and government health departments.

Dr MAYA is a boon for doctors, because it will make their lives easier and help improve the care they offer to their patients. Additionally, they can forward referral letters and sick notes, and search for information using the internet while speaking to a patient. And that’s not all: Patients can watch videos and see pictures, read information sheets to help manage common medical problems and reduce wasted consultations, save money, and decrease the incidence of cross-infections (sick people with different illnesses getting each other even sicker because of unnecessary contact).

By integrating Dr MAYA with the IT revolution, we have created the world’s first tool to help identify and monitor infections. Offering such a powerful way to help doctors communicate, manage their patients better, and reduce the costs of running their clinics and offices will encourage them to participate. Health departments, hospitals, airlines, healthcare service providers, and doctors can create their own portals and offer services to registered users. This tool could also reduce the number of receptionists, booking clerks, and “doctors’ assistants,” all of whom greatly inflate the cost of health care.

Dr MAYA can particularly help poorer countries because it can enable them to skip the time and expense of building already-obsolete medical communications systems. Dr MAYA can also be adapted to help people communicate during times of natural calamities and wars as well as pandemic disease threats.

My colleagues and I are offering Dr MAYA free as a humanitarian service to protect healthcare professionals and all our fellow human beings. We must act now to prevent and control the tsunami of superbugs and viruses that could wipe millions of people off the face of the planet.