Antibiotic resistance is very, very metabolically expensive. Bugs which are resistant die out pretty rapidly when you take antibiotics out of the environment.

Antibiotic resistance is very, very metabolically expensive. Bugs which are resistant die out pretty rapidly when you take antibiotics out of the environment. In Sweden, they went on a very serious campaign to cut antibiotic use to give the genes time to die out and preserve the effectiveness of their antibiotics, and it has proven highly effective over a couple of decades. In the US, pervasive use of antibiotics in livestock and pathological incentives to prescribe in the medical system mean that antibiotic resistance hard to get a handle on, but that's a system pathology, not a biological menace from the stars. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18545950 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18545950 is pretty comprehensive if you want the detail.