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.

Where the logic made no sense was optional repeats. I would get told "here is one course, if you dont feel better, you can take this script for the second". So after five days you finish the first and if you feel better its fine to stop. But if you take one pill from course 2, well you better finish it or you'll be breeding resistance.