‘It’s happening on the scale of a pandemic’: the drug-resistant infections killing African babies

Illnesses that would once have been easily managed are no longer responding to antibiotics, and the world's poorest regions are being hit hardest

Her tiny body hooked up to machines twice her size, her mother standing vigil at the side of her cot, Yusra was in a struggle for life. The baby had severe sepsis, which meant her body had turned on itself - her immune system attacking her organs. Doctors tried different antibiotics but none of the drugs were working.

Yusra and her twin had been born two months premature, by caesarean section, in Woldia, a hill town in the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia where rebel and government forces are in violent conflict. Two years earlier, the hospital had been raided by a militia which stripped it of vital supplies. At six days old, Yusra's sister died for want of a blood transfusion.