All these &quot;back to the dark ages&quot; worst case scenarios seem to assume that we&#x27;ll wake up one day and realize that every single one of our antibiotics has stopped working on anything. That&#x27;s not how it&#x27;s going to happen. It only takes a few years for most strains of bacteria to lose their resistant traits, and we&#x27;re going to have years of undeniable warning signs. (As opposed to the deniable warning signs we have now.)<p>What&#x27;s actually going to happen: We&#x27;re going to have an epidemic of some sort of drug-resistant bacteria in the Western world--maybe that incurable TB that&#x27;s going around, maybe something else. A few thousand Westerners are going to die--people the Western world actually cares about, as opposed to them poor people in them third world countries that are always dropping like flies anyway.<p>There&#x27;ll be a media hysteria similar to the Ebola crisis. People will suddenly realize that antibiotic resistance isn&#x27;t just a problem affecting poor people in third world countries, but that it is now a problem threatening them and their children.<p>The resulting media blitz will educate even the average idiot about the importance of taking the full course of antibiotics even if you feel much better already. Antibiotic use on lifestock will be banned. Western governments will pressure China and India into stopping the unrestricted sale of antibiotic. Western doctors are finally going to realize that prescribing antibiotics like candy just to shut a patient up is a mistake <i>even if the patient is yelling really loudly.</i> Developing a new antibiotic is sudenly going to be a lucrative or at least PR-relevant strategy for Big Pharma, instead of a likely fincancial loss. Hospitals are going to be forced to actually deal with the problem of MRSA. (Right now, many patients that should be tested and isolated aren&#x27;t tested because there&#x27;s no room to isolate them in case of a positive result.)<p>Within a few years, drug resistance will taper off sharply, without antibiotics ever losing their use except in the case of a few rare resistant diseases, which will be tested for and isolated. Problem solved.<p>These are all things we could do right now, if we wanted to, we just don&#x27;t care about the problem enough. The moment it becomes big enough to interest the majority of the population, we know how to solve this.