Crisis

Misuse of antibiotics worldwide has become a crisis. Some countries employ too few to control bacteria and some use too many, thereby increasing resistance to their efficacy. It is an issue of availability and communication. The World Health Organization has put out an alert, but it needs to be transmitted to individual doctors worldwide who then need to change their prescription practices. That is the hard part. There are hundreds of thousands of physicians, each of whom needs to get an appropriate message. Some will rein in their habits right away and some not at all. Nature won’t be accommodating, however. Bugs are evolving constantly and developing tools to fight back against antibiotics. It only takes one noncompliant doctor to keep progression going. That is why it is urgent to find new antibiotics to replace those that have been compromised.