So, there's a growing problem with antimicrobial resistance caused by: 1. Overuse of antibiotics in medicine and in agriculture.
2. Chronic apathy on the part of the medical profession in dealing with the problem in a strategic way.
3. The abandonment of research by the pharmas because there was not enough money in it for them to develop new ones. Sounds like a perfect storm.
The antibiotic pipeline for gram-negative bugs is dry. Newly evolved strains of some bacteria can be resistant to nearly every antibiotic, so they are bringing back old, old antibiotics. The issue is that old antibiotics are not as good at differentiating human cells and bacterial cells, they just kill all cells, so have horrible side effects. Consider that antibiotics have been in use for only decades. Humans have invented many great antibiotics that were super effective (!), and in a mere 40 or so years, many bacteria have already evolved to be resistant to all of them? They are really amazing organisms and will keep evolving as fast as we create new antibiotics, which is not very fast any more. How do you think we will deal with this issue in another 2 decades when VRE, MRSA and other super-bugs are more prevalent?
Northern Virginia's commuter rail line is a super-bug? How? It barely gets to Fredericksburg. Dulles Airport I'd believe... In all seriousness, I'm effing terrified. We'll probably have some new treatments in a couple decades. However we'll only get them because of some horrifying epidemic. Cringely had an article about one thing we could be doing now: making hospitals less like petri dishes by using chip fab clean room tactics. Simply flushing the air more effectively and frequently would go a long way.