When Andrew Speaker boarded an Air France flight for Paris last month carrying a form of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, he became a global pariah--both for the lethal bug in his system and for the folly of exposing other people to it. But while Speaker may have been reckless, the blame for the emergence of drug-resistant bugs like the one he is incubating falls partly on the rest of us. For years public-health officials have been raising the alarm about how our overreliance on antibiotics is breeding a generation of superbugs, increasingly resistant to the medicines designed to kill them. The problem...
Fighting Drug-Resistant Bugs
The case of Andrew Speaker's TB highlights the important battle between bacteria and new antibiotics
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