A pillar of medical treatment is under threat →

When you’re sick, you expect the medicine a doctor gives you to work. But the effectiveness of one of the most important types of drugs — antibiotics — is under threat.

In the United States alone, there are 2 million antibiotic resistant infections causing 23,000 deaths each year. You say that you never get sick, so this isn’t your problem. But what if I told you that antibiotics make modern medicine possible, including surgery, cancer treatment and organ transplants? Half of men and a third of women will get cancer in their lifetimes. Many treatments for cancer weaken the immune system, putting you at risk for infection.

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Doctors are a big part of the problem. We’re prescribing broader and broader big gun antibiotics, and this creates stronger evolutionary pressure on bugs to mutate and become resistant, mostly because we aren’t sure what we’re treating. We figure that if we cover all our bases, we won’t go wrong. Better diagnostic tests that were quick, easy and work well would make us feel more confident we haven’t missed something.