Much of modern medicine is built upon the foundations that antibiotics provide, and those foundations are now crumbling. We have used these drugs so indiscriminately that many bacteria have evolved to resist them, and some nigh-invincible strains can now shrug off every medicine we throw at them.36 At the same time, we have utterly failed to develop new drugs to replace the ones that are becoming obsolete. We are heading into a terrifying post-antibiotic era.
