From the August 11 & 18 New Yorker, "Superbugs," by Jerome Groopman:
Before the development of antibiotics, the threat of infection was urgent: until 1936, pneumonia was the No. 1 cause of death in the United States, and amputation was sometimes the only cure for infected wounds.
That was only 72 years ago.
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yeah -- there was a long article on multi-drug-resistant bacteria in the New Yorker recently, and it really kept me up nights. I don't know what we can do to keep antibiotics out of our food chain (the raising of animals for food uses tons of such materials every year just for a small % weight gain), but I fully expect that we will repent this laxity at leisure...
Union of Concerned Scientists is one organization trying to fight this fight! there's a lot hospitals can do, too, to prevent hospital-acquired infections, but it takes vigilance...
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