Halloween is coming up. But if you really want to scare yourself, I suggest you read this interview with an associate director at the CDC about the “end of antibiotics.” Essentially we are not only seeing more bacteria that are resistant to absolutely every medication we have but these bacteria are now spreading outside of hospitals and are more rapidly sharing their genetic antibacterial immunity with other much more common bacteria.
In the meantime there are no (as in zero) new antibiotics in the drug pipeline. I for one am not inclined to say let’s wait for some startup to figure out that this might be an opportunity. Instead this is a perfect example of a massive market failure and exactly the kind of situation in which we need government to intervene. So far unfortunately we have not seen any action by politicians despite experts using words such as “nightmare” to describe the present situation.
So one other suggestion: if you are a newly minted billionaire or know one, this might be a good place to spend some serious money. Full drug development costs a fortune, but we need to put a lot of new ideas into the pipeline if we want to find something that works.
