I absolutely agree that it won't be as gloomy as outlined in the article. The search for novel antibiotics has been pretty much neglected (Teixobactin is more of an exception to the rule) because the currently employed drugs work quite well. As this is changing, the possible market for novel antibiotics will increase and thus funding will shift into this direction.
"Strains of bacterial pathogens that have acquired mutations conferring antibiotic resistance often have a lower growth rate and are less invasive or transmissible initially than their susceptible counterparts." http://aac.asm.org/content/54/5/2085.full
If evolutionary logic holds (and there's little doubt about that, though research on the rate of resistance lose with time varies), switching to new classes of antibiotics and not using old ones until resistance to them de-evolves is a viable strategy.
Too long. You can get significant mileage out of a 3 year ban but resistance will return very quickly afterwards. You'd need to wait decades to truly reset the clock.
> After three years of banning the use of that antibiotic, the resistance of the bacteria dropped significantly. But because there were resisitant strains that persisted right through the end of the study in 2008, it was likely that the resistance would surge once again if the antibiotic were reintroduced. To safely reintroduce the antibiotic, Townsend said, you have to kill off all the pathogens.
> Considering how important antibiotics have become to human health — from the treatment of strep throat to MRSA to tuberculosis — Townsend says a 45-year ban on most antibiotics would be impractical. Doctors estimate it takes about that long for the resistance to disappear.
The problem is China loves to pump their livestock full of it to boost production, and now we're starting to see bacteria strains that are resistant to it.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/21/mcr-gene-...
The WHO simply do not have any teeth to enforce shelving, and it's probably going to take a major health crisis before it's even on the table.
The use of common antibiotics isn't good, by any means, but last-defense drugs being used is far worse.
At least two cases have been detected in the US, the first was earlier this year, the second as of yesterday.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160711150939.h...
As mentioned in the article, the colistin resistance is being transmitted via plasmid, so it is capable of diffusing quite widely into different types of bacteria.
Ideally you have enough different classes of antibiotics that you can maintain a constant rotation and always have new antibiotics coming off shelved status so you can retire antibiotics that've formed resistances. Even better, a larger library of antibiotics directly improves the effectiveness of this strategy - in the short term, introducing a new class means you can shelve an old, resisted class; in the long term, more classes means each class can spend longer on the shelf and we reduce antibiotic resistance further.