Episode 1

What happens if antibiotics stop working?

It's the Solstice music festival, when 150,000 people descend on a farm in the North-East for the open-air event of the summer. The audience pours in from all over the UK and beyond. The artistes come from all round the globe. The journalists likewise.

Among the hacks is Zoe Meadows, who has left her husband Jamie and two small children at home to watch the event on TV. For really, if you weren't working, who would actually want to be there, partying for a weekend without adequate sanitary facilities on what is, at its heart, an agricultural site?

You wouldn't go hungry, though. Well, you might if you thought too closely about those hundreds of food stalls desperate to keep their costs down, not asking too many questions of their meat suppliers, not really caring whether those hand-crafted pork sausages are from pigs stuffed full of antibiotics on the intensive farming unit they came from. One of those food stalls is Sam's Sausage Sandwiches, run by Sam and Lisa Shore.

Zoe owes them a great deal. Since becoming a mother and wanting fewer hours she has taken a step back from investigative journalism and has settled for covering the softer stories such as Solstice. Even this wouldn't have been possible without Sam and Lisa who stepped in to look after the kids when both her and Jamie were working...
 

Episode 2

A mystery disease seems to be spreading and nobody's quite sure how it's travelling. Is it in the air we breathe? Is it in the water we drink ? Is it in the food we eat?

Zoe is trying to get an interview with Aasmah about the research that's being funded into the disease. But Aasmah's not talking, on orders from above. Politics has entered the game. Barry Tomlinson is the chief of Public Health in England. He's a desperately worried man. He persuades the minister that it's time for a crisis meeting. Politicians hate the word 'crisis' unless they're well on the way to solving it, so the minister is determined not to make a big deal out of it.

Meanwhile, Josef Nowak is facing a nightmare at the pig farm. His animals are dying and nothing the vet can do is helping.

Zoe and Jamie talk about what they might do to avoid being caught up in the epidemic. His aunt has a smallholding in the Welsh mountains; they could load the car up with tins and dried food and hole up there till the worst has passed. Zoe is torn between wanting to protect them and wanting to be a good journalist and get to the heart of what's going on ...

Episode 3

With countries either collapsing or in crisis – scientists are battling to discover an effective antibiotic. 

Scientists in Germany think they've found an antibiotic that's effective against Zips. Human trials have been accelerated. The horror is out there and growing. The countryside has become a smoking pyre. Government ministers sit in a crisis meeting and they simply don't know what to do.

News reports start to break up and then disappear. Aasmah in her lab talks about the grim prospects with a colleague. It's clear that some countries have collapsed completely. Civil society is starting to break down. There have been food riots in some cities. The dead are beginning to back up in the streets. Other diseases are flaring up because of the decay and decomposition.