[Carry_Okie]

Every antibiotic, given the ability of bacteria to evolve rapidly to survive, is bound to become ineffective sooner or later. The trick is to ensure a steady stream of new drugs that the resistant microbes have never encountered before. We need medical science to advance more rapidly than the bacteria do.

First: My understanding is that there is a new class of antibiotics on the way. Second: "The trick" is to rotate the use of antibiotics, so as not to keep using the same chemistry everywhere, such that when the superbugs lose their adaptation to any one of them one can go back to the others.

[Balding_Eagle]

There has always been a new class, new strain, new something, of antibiotics coming on-line.

This story could have been, and in fact was, written in the 70’s, when I started out farming.

I took it seriously back then, but this story has had more than 40 annual updates, and it still reads the same as it did way back then.