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

There's a pretty simple solution to the lack of new antibiotics that I've never seen anyone suggest: up the amount of time that any new antibiotics are patented.

Right now there's not much of an incentive to create new antibiotics. It's quite rare that something can't be taken out with the antibiotics we have, and while that's slowly getting worse it means that drug companies probably can't make back their investment by the time the drug goes generic.

So, up it to 25 years or something like that. It's better we have some expensive drugs that work than none at all.

A problem is that any novel antibiotic is put on the restricted use list of reserve antibiotics which massively shrinks the market.

The challenge is balancing access and abuse. Longer patents could mean higher prices and limited global access