Antibiotics are important drugs, perhaps the most important. In a world beset with βan unprecedented wave of new and old infections,β as one expert recently wrote, it is critically important that antibiotics work well when people need them.
But antibiotics are frequently misused β overprescribed or incorrectly taken by patients, and recklessly fed to farm animals. As a result, lifesaving antibacterial drugs lose effectiveness faster than new ones are developed to replace them.
Each year, 100,000 people in the United States die from hospital-acquired infections that are resistant to antibiotics, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/health/22brody.html?_r=2&ref=health