When the World Health Organization issued a report last February highlighting the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that posed the gravest public health threats, it capped a disheartening year. A powerful variety of E. coli reached American shores, and a Nevada woman died of an infection untreatable by available antibiotics.
While it’s not time to panic, the stakes are high. The U.S. sees about 2 million resistant infections every year, and medical professionals still have no real solutions. If additional resistant bugs develop, or if the existing ones take over, our modern way of life would end. Infected paper cuts and blisters could prove deadly; surgeries would become more risky. Crop yields would plummet.
Chalk it up as one more casualty of the Cold War.
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Geopolitics and antibiotics have crossed paths ever since the birth of the wonder drugs.
When Australian pathologist Howard Florey and British biochemist Norman Heatley first brought Penicillium ...
