.. infectious-disease specialists like Brad Spellberg of UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine have been reading up on those days because of a growing fear they are not all in the past. Wealthy countries take for granted the triumph of science over bacteria, but increasingly doctors are coming up against infections that can be quelled only by the most powerful antibiotics known to medicine—or by none of them. "It's already happening," says Spellberg, to the tune of roughly 100,000 deaths a year from antibiotic-resistant infections in the United States alone. "But it's going to become much more common." Imagine a world in which antibiotics resemble chemotherapy drugs—producing toxic side effects and unpredictable outcomes instead of the guaranteed cures we have come to expect...
We have handicapped ourselves in this race, partly through carelessness and partly as an outcome of the complex politics and economics of drug policy. We've squandered our antibiotics through overuse—in animal feed, or on diseases they can't cure, such as influenza—and, paradoxically, by under-use. Particularly among the poor and illiterate, it's not uncommon for patients to stop taking antibiotics as soon as they feel better—leaving behind a residual population of resistant bacteria to multiply and spread. Read full at Newsweek
