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.

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

Decreasing big pharma's quarterly profits is not an easy sell, you mean?

Or are we supposed to pretend any of this has to do with concern over people's well being?

First, selling generic antibiotics isn't the money-maker you might be imagining. A lot of them are made overseas.

Second, try to convince a random family that they should withhold antibiotics and let grandma die of pneumonia and report how that conversation went.