Use of Antimicrobial Agents and Drug Resistance

The globalization of business, travel, and communication has brought increased attention to exchanges between farflung communities and countries. Similarly, awareness of the potential globalization of the bacterial ecosystem has led to a greater awareness of the interactions between community and hospital and between human and animal floras.The optimism generated by the dawn of the antimicrobial era in the mid-1940s was soon quenched by the emergence of penicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Whereas before 1946 about 90 percent of S. aureus isolates in hospitals were susceptible to penicillin, 75 percent of isolates were resistant by 1952.¹ At first, a distinction was made . . .