I've been hearing about the coming Antibiotics Apocalypse for some time now, and while it sounds very dangerous I'm wondering what signs to look for about how bad it's getting. Articles like these point to limited things like an increase in MSRA outbreaks or vague statements about increasing infections from hospitals, but it's not like average people are dying in the streets or anything. How do we tell how much we're moving on the long continuum from here to there while keeping isolated stories in the larger context of overall antibiotic resistance?
Yes, average people are dying in the streets. Hospital infections, many of which are caused by resistant organisms, are a major cause of death in the United States.
Beyond that, you now have things like extensively resistant Gonorrhea, which has taken a disease that is fairly common, but easy to treat if caught and thus embarrassing without being dangerous, and turned it into a serious problem, especially for women.
The answer for "How do we tell" is that epidemiologists (like me) do a lot of surveillance for antibiotic resistance. We ask why hospital patients died, and what organism killed them - and what is was susceptible to.
And the answer is this is a rather serious problem.
