Superbug exhibition unmasked in China

A traveling exhibition about bacterial infection is proving to be a remarkably well-timed hit with visitors in China after it reopened following the lifting of restrictions on movement as part of efforts to combat the novel coronavirus outbreak.

The Superbugs exhibition at the Chongqing Science and Technology Museum is a localized version of an exhibition that ran until spring 2019 at the Science Museum in London, after which a variety of offshoot displays opened around the world.

But as curator Sheldon Paquin said, the outbreak of the novel coronavirus has cast the exhibition in a new light, particularly in China. "This is a global story but every country is different, with different fields of expertise, so each version of the exhibition celebrates that in its own way.

"We had a four-city tour planned in China, having been open at the Guangdong Science Center for four months, and then Chongqing since December.

"We were intending to go to Wuhan in April and we will still go there, to the Wuhan Science and Technology Museum.

"Before everything changed, we'd already had around 650,000 visitors at the first two stops of the tour, and we'd had a really positive response. We weren't expecting that many people so we were very happy."

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria account for 700,000 deaths each year, and by 2050, that figure is expected to rise to 10 million. But Paquin insists the exhibition is not as bleak as those statistics look－quite the opposite.

"We look at it in a very different way," he said. "We celebrate the power of bacteria, we want to look at it the way you look at a lion on the savanna－it's beautiful, powerful and worthy of respect. We want people to look at bacteria like that."

The nature and timing of the virus outbreak in China, as opposed to other countries, means that the Chinese version of the exhibition is the only one currently open, and Paquin said they were exploring ways to try to incorporate recent events into the display.

"We're still in conversation about how to make changes. We really want to but we haven't figured out how to update it yet," Paquin said. "For now, though, we're just thrilled to see people coming back and getting interested in the subject."