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If a malaria parasite has a one-in-a-million chance of being resistant to a given drug, then it has only a one-in-a-trillion chance of being resistant to two drugs.

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*Which act via different mechanisms of action, are equally effective, and whose assaults on the parasite have an equal chance of working

Right. I'm definitely oversimplifying.

I'd say you were just simplifying, no over- about it. That seemed like a good level of simplicity for the explanation.

So would a decent formula for drugs A and B be: rAdiff x rBdiff x rshared = r% where the rA/Bdiff is the chance of resisting the unique parts of A and B and rshared is the chance of resisting what is shared between them?

Or in essence, turning the random nature of mutation into a liability instead of a strength.

The odds of evolving multiple resistance in parallel are minuscule compared to developing it in series.

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