Reenergising antibiotic policy: hallmarks for a sustainable antibiotic future?

Antibiotics are connected to our very ways of living. They set our expectations for what is possible both for health care, food systems, and our economies. Antibiotics are infrastructure.

But this infrastructure is crumbling. The volume of antibiotic use, combined with multiple opportunities for spread of bacteria across and between populations, has led to an increase in bacteria resisting the effects of antibiotics around the world. Gonorrhoea is becoming less easy to treat, with reports of resistance to multiple drugs around the globe. Pakistani authorities recently reported a new strain of typhoid, which was resistant to the last affordable oral antibiotic in the area. This is just the tip of the iceberg.