Antibiotic resistance now 'global threat', WHO warns (BBC)
By Pippa Stephens
Health reporter, BBC News
Resistance to antibiotics poses a "major global threat" to public health, says a new report by the World Health Organization (WHO).
It analysed data from 114 countries and said resistance was happening now "in every region of the world".
It described a "post-antibiotic era", where people die from simple infections that have been treatable for decades.
There were likely to be "devastating" implications unless "significant" action was taken urgently, it added.
The report focused on seven different bacteria responsible for common serious diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhoea and blood infections.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27204988
If you've ever read about life in earlier times, you know it was not uncommon for people to die of infections resulting from minor cuts -- one man who smashed a glass at his daughter's wedding cut himself on one of the fragments and died a few days later, and the mathematician Edouard Lucas died from a cut to his cheek from a broken dish at a banquet. Pretty scary to think we are returning to that.
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The full report (pdf) is 254 pages, almost 4GB. Also available at the link are a summary (313 KB), and a good infographic (638KB).
My wife is co-founder and CEO of a start-up company that develops drugs to address the large medical need caused by the rapid rise in drug resistance in multiple diseases. The company focuses on globally-important infectious diseases where additional drugs are urgently needed. Each year, there are over 250 million cases of malaria and over 4 billion cases of bacterial diarrhea and these diseases cause over 3 million deaths worldwide. The malaria parasites and bacteria that cause these diseases are increasingly resistant to treatment with normal drugs, with resistance showing in up to 70% of bacteria and up to 90% of malaria parasites.
They have three projects in the pipeline, two antimalarial series and one to address bacteria that cause life-threatening diarrhea. They have also done some work with partners on MRSA and drug resistant tuberculosis. She has had a difficult task maintaining funding over the last three years, but finally this year she was able to close a fairly and major round of investment and the company also just received a three year Phase II STTR grant from NIH.
Identifying the urgency of these problems, as the WHO report does, will certainly encourage work on the immediate solutions, but the problem is likely to never disappear. Breakthroughs will be hard won. As humans develop new drugs that overcome the resistance, the microbes will respond with novel means of resistance, as they have done with most of our current antibiotics.
Thanks for the post, esm.
My background is infectious diseases and new antibiotic development. It's been well known for quite some time among my colleagues that we are way behind and not likely able to get in front of the emerging resistance problem unless something is done NOW. Big pharma doesn't invest in new antibiotic development because return on investment is low and they'd rather pour their money into drugs for chronic health problems. Start-ups rely on the government for funding and when one of their drugs looks promising, are usually bought out by big pharma (daptomycin comes to mind).
To really tackle the problem of pan-resistant infections, it's going to take a global initiative with government funding at the front line. This should have been created and implemented years ago though instead of putting this issue on the back burner until we are in the middle of an unfoldling crisis.
I applaud the work your wife's company is doing and happy they received the NIH grant for Phase II efforts. I hope the trials are successful.
http://www.idsociety.org/10x20/
...though the anti-malarial is chloroquine based. Here's a paper the will give you an idea of the technology: Reversed chloroquine molecules as a strategy to overcome resistance in malaria.
They have patent protection in a few countries.
I am fairly certain the lead research (and author of the paper) is a member of IDSA.
Thanks for your encouragement. My wife is really hoping the trials are successful, too! 
