Horizon Season 36, Episode 2
Airs: 9:00pm - 9:50pm on BBC TWO
Paul Mayho has a disease that was completely unknown only a few decades ago. He was then infected with another disease that was thought to have disappeared entirely from the West. As we enter the 21st-century with all our modern medical weaponry the question is: how could these things be happening? The dominant species on this planet are not humans. They are organisms too small to see with the naked eye, viruses and bacteria. Many believed that we would have won the battle against these microbes in the last century, but things turned out very differently. The new things that will kill us in this century will be unknown emerging microbes and the return of old plagues that we thought had been defeated. Scientists now know that we can never defeat nature itself.