A hundred years ago, if you got an infectious disease, the best available course of action was to be sure your will was in order. Then came sulfonamides, penicillins, and an impressive sequence of broad-spectrum antibiotics that cured everything from syphilis to plague.

Alas, microorganisms are smarter than we are. As quickly as an effective drug is put to use, the bugs find ways to circumvent them. The velocity of new drug discovery has not quickened—in fact it has lost pace—and there are strains of pathogenic bacteria that no drug will touch.

Science recently devoted a whole issue (18 July 2008) to the vagaries of this subject. Makes for interesting, even if scary, reading.

In addition to waiting for clever chemists to design new drugs, methinks two commonsense public-health practices would be effective in reducing the onslaught of drug-resistant organisms:

1. Don’t make writing a prescription the only satisfying end to a doctor’s visit. Too many of us leave with a slip of paper entitling us to access a drug that doesn’t address our underlying ailment and does facilitate the emergence of resistant bugs.
2. Restrict the growth-promotion use of antibiotics in food animals. This practice surely lowers the cost of meat, but it also promotes drug resistance in beasties that can later cause human disease. Not an acceptable trade-off in my book.