Antibiotics—From There to Where?: How the antibiotic miracle is threatened by resistance and a broken market and what we can do about it

To fully appreciate the importance of antibiotics to everyday life, we must step back to the edge of the pre-antibiotic era when these lifesaving drugs were first introduced into clinical use. In the pre-antibiotic era skin and soft tissue infections such as cellulitis and erysipelas (frequently confused) were often deadly. These serious infections of the subcutaneous fascia could involve the lymphatics and spread systemically. In the pre-antibiotic era, bacteremia was common and mortality reached as high as 15%. The introduction of sulfonamides into clinical use in the 1930s changed that and the resulting mortality was reduced to 2% [1]