How patent protection for antibiotics creates incentives to render them useless

I'm confused. Patents are the cause of a decrease in effectiveness of antibiotics?

I was in Mexico last week and could buy many types of antibiotics over-the-counter without a prescription, and the prices all seemed below what you'd see for comparable generic drugs in the US. Obviously they're not even interested in medical supervision when distributing antibiotics (and a bunch of other drugs). My assumption is that they're even less interested in who owns what patent.

Drug companies pushing doctors to use their products seems like a drop in the bucket compared with policies that make antibiotics cheaply and easily available without supervision from those trained in medicine.

That said, I'm opposed to abusing the patent system by granting longer patents. Protect those willing to create new and useful drugs so they can make a profit... but keep them on their toes by not letting the rest on their laurels forever while they milk some patent dry.

The flip side of patent protection is this is what encourages drug companies to spend the multiple years of drug research and drug approval to develop new antibiotics.

I certainly agree that the patent system is non-optimal and should overhauled/replaced, but we also have to figure out a better way of funding drug development as part of that project. Maybe more government funding of basic drug research? Perhaps, but then it becomes a highly political issues (i.e., something the Republican Party would fight tooth and nail against).

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4180605

The problem is not the drugs, themselves, but rather what they are used to treat: short-term infections. Compare this to things like statins (cholesterol drugs), which are almost always used for the remaining lifespan of the patient. Then consider the primary affected populations. Poor populations (with poor sanitation, access to clean drinking water, and regular health care) that have little disposable income are going to be the major consumers of antibiotics. High cholesterol, on the other hand, is a disease of the affluent.

So I think the article is wrong that extended patent protection will lead to more antibiotic abuse. Pretty much any short-term market approach to antibiotics will lead either to their over-use for marginally reasonable purposes, or simply result in less investment overall (compare the number of new antibiotics to the number of new statins over the last 2 decades).

No, antibiotics (and bacterial countermeasures in general) seem to me to be more amenable to an insurance approach. Most people don't expect to die in a fire, but they do spend money on the possibility. Most people, similarly, don't expect to die from a bacterial infection. Today, that means they don't spend any money on the possibility. That needs to change.

The challenge, of course, is that when the shit hits the fan, good luck justifying not providing antibiotics to people who didn't pay their "premiums". So, really, you need something like car insurance, where everyone (and here I also mean every country) is required to buy in.

I always wondered, isn't there a limited supply of how many Antibiotics "we" can create/synthesize? I only have a very limited understanding of Biology I'd love if someone could explain to me whether the "post-antibiotic era" is a real thread and at some point bacteria will get resistant to all the antibiotics we have at our disposal.