All true, but once one understands the microbiology, it becomes obvious why drug companies are giving up on antibiotics. It's perfectly rational behavior -- no matter what antibiotics we invent, the microbes will evolve resistance to them in a short time. That's been the history of antibiotics until now, and there's no reason to expect the future to be any different -- if anything, it will probably become worse.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/health-science-techn...
Title: "Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached 'The End of Antibiotics, Period'"
Why doesn't it get more press? I don't know for sure, but it is:
- Ongoing, which makes for bad news
- Kind of depressing, because we are slowly losing the battle
- Feels a little bit hopeless, because foolish choices by individuals accelerate the development of resistance, and inventing new antibiotics doesn't fix that fundamental problem
I've personally spoken to a couple of GPs/Docs and they said after a few hours of people coming in and asking they get tired and give in.
Between that and farms using them like M&Ms (smarties ;-) ) on the cattle it seems like people are taking a precious resource and throwing it on the floor.
Secondly, if it weren't for this outbreak, all of these treatments and vaccines would likely sit around in clinical trial hell for quite a while.
Cynically speaking, since clinical trials are so risky and expensive, its best if the developers can off-load some of that risk and expense. Picking something like Ebola, surviving on government funding (because its seen as strategic), and waiting for an emergency to allow you to skip a lot of red tape, and get dollops of support, isn't really a terrible choice.
Oh, and antibiotics are hard. For an overview of the current state of antibiotic development, you can take a look here:
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-brie...
Note that 43 drugs are in the pipeline.