Fight to Save Antibiotics

For once, the headlines about the latest health scare are not hyperbole: The end of the Antibiotics Era may be nigh. Staving it off will require fast and creative thinking not only in medical science, but also in public policy.

Public-health officials were horrified but not surprised to find a Pennsylvania woman who had an infection with the same kind of drug resistance first identified last fall on farms in China. The E. coli found in the woman carried the same genetic mechanism of resistance to colistin -- a last-resort antibiotic -- that was discovered in Chinese livestock that were routinely fed the drug. And this mechanism is easily spread from one bug to another.