Superbugs are here. Microbes vanquished for decades are slowly mutating to resist our pharmaceutical defenses. In U.S. hospitals, bacterial infections sicken almost 2 million people a year and kill 90,000. In more than 70 percent of afflicted patients, the bacteria have become resistant to one or more antibiotics. More ominously, drug-resistant strains that were formerly found only in hospitals have cropped up in community settings, such as schools, jails, and Army training centers. A more recent threat, HIV, continues to mutate toward drug resistance. Some studies suggest that 10 to 20 percent of newly infected patients in the United States are resistant to at least one HIV drug, and a rare, multidrug-resistant strain cropped up in an infected man in New York City in 2005.
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