Health officials in the US are sounding the alarm over drug-resistant bacteria

This isn’t news. The alarm bells have been clanging away for decades. One of the scariest, is drug-resistant TB. I understand there’s also drug-resistant leprosy, but that doesn’t transmit easily.

I’m old enough to remember that penicillin cured almost everything. You started a 10-day course, and felt better in a day and a half.

The problem was that many folks stopped taking it, when they felt better.

These days, American meat is absolutely overflowing with antibiotics. I don’t know if there’s any kind of serious effort to address that.

> The problem was that many folks stopped taking it, when they felt better.

This really wasn't the problem. There was never any strong science behind it, other than just an abundance of caution. But you can also argue that taking antibiotics for an extra week is bad because it prolongs the evolutionary pressure on microbes to develop resistance.

Either way, stuff like that is inconsequential. Most drug-resistant strains crop up in hospice and hospital settings where immunocompromised or gravely ill patients are kept on a cocktail of antibiotics for months or years, and resistant bacteria have a significant advantage and can spread easily.

And it's not like we have a good alternative to that - "let more people die earlier" is not an easy sell.

This is possibly followed by overuse of antibiotics in animal husbandry, although that part is more complicated than usually implied.

Humans, as a rule, do not take antibiotics every day of every year.

Factory Farms do feed animals low doses of antibiotics constantly because doing so makes farm animals more efficient at converting animal feed into tasty, tasty meat.

We aren't talking about giving injured or sick animals or people antibiotics until they are well, we are talking about creating conditions on huge factory farms where bacteria can only survive and thrive if they evolve the ability to shrug off the constant presence of antibiotics.

Unfortunately, bacteria also are able to trade those antibiotic resistance genes from one strain to another, so new antibiotic resistance genes can get transferred to bacteria like tuberculosis that are already a problem without learning new genetic tricks.

Look up the percentage of antibiotics by weight that are used on farms vs. those given to people.

> Of all antibiotics sold in the United States, approximately 80% are sold for use in animal agriculture; about 70% of these are “medically important” (i.e., from classes important to human medicine). Antibiotics are administered to animals in feed to marginally improve growth rates

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4638249/