Drug-resistant bacteria are a metastasizing global menace. For the past seventy-five years, roughly since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the GI Bill of Rights, society has enjoyed a wondrous time span where powerful antibiotic drugs allowed medical practitioners to aggressively fight a broad array of common bacterial infections.
But the golden years of antibiotics are waning, and many of the bugs they have reliably killed now have genes that allow them to resist our medicines unscathed. Drug-resistant tuberculosis and pneumonia, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and pathogenic E. coli, Shigella, and Salmonella — these terms were once relegated to technical medical conversations but are now commonly heard on the nightly news.
