What is the "Ideal" Treatment Method for Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria?

Barry Kreiswirth, PhD, founding director, Public Health Research Institute Tuberculosis Center, professor of medicine at Rutgers University, discusses the “ideal” treatment method for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“Wearing my ‘tuberculosis hat,’ the one thing that we’ve learned historically, and the HIV community has learned this as well, [is that] the best way to treat bacteria that are drug-resistant is to actually treat them with multiple drugs.

Now, the problem is that we don’t have new, effective drugs, never mind more than one. The dilemma is that if you develop a good, effective drug, you want to keep it on reserve, but that just becomes problematic because even though from a societal point of view it’s the right thing to do, a patient and a doctor have a different relationship, and if a doctor has to treat a patient and that’s the only drug available, it’s his or her responsibility to treat.

We do have a dilemma now from a public health point of view and a societal point of view to a doctor-patient relationship. The doctor-patient relationship trumps our public health concerns, but it does say that we better get new, effective therapy because even the doctors are really struggling to be able to get successful treatment options.”