Revenge of the Microbes American hospitals are safe and clean. Our doctors are among the best-trained in the world. But there is a dark side that almost no one wants to talk about. Sixty thousand people a year die in American hospitals from infections they did not have when they entered.
Doctors fight back with a shrinking arsenal of antibiotics.
Resistant strains of flesh-eating bacteria, untreatable pneumonia, gonorrhea and salmonella are only the tip of the iceberg. Around the world, millions of people are dying from drug-resistant tuberculosis and malaria. Scientists hold their breath, nervously aware that the future may look more like the 1920s than the 21st century, and that drug-resistance has brought us to the edge of a coming plague.