Personal View of the Antibiotic Value Proposition

In this brief viewpoint, I present four examples from my life in the practice of medicine and infectious diseases that illustrate both the miracle of antibiotics and the despair when they fail. There is the patient with pneumococcal pneumonia that was rapidly cured but also a disastrous outbreak of highly resistant Pseudomonas infection in a ward of severely burned patients where antibiotic treatment was ultimately futile. I note the utility of a new antibiotic in treating otherwise highly resistant Serratia infections. Finally, I discuss a patient with extensively resistant tuberculosis who came under my care.