Today, MRSA and its cousins kill an estimated 700,000 people around the world annually. Until recently a drug called vancomycin was effective against MRSA, but now resistance has begun to emerge to it. At the same time, we are facing the formidable-sounding carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) infections, which are immune to virtually everything we can throw at them. CRE kills about half of all those it sickens. Luckily, so far, it doesn’t usually infect healthy people. But watch out if it does. Yet as the problem has grown, the pharmaceutical
