The health and economic burden of resistance has not escaped the attention of federal legislators, who have proposed policies to slow the emergence and spread of resistance and resistant infections in communities, health care facilities, and food-producing animals. Bills introduced during the 2009–2010 session of Congress focused on three important strategies for curbing resistance: (1) encouraging judicious antibiotic use; (2) reducing hospital infections using public reporting programs; and (3) stimulating the development of new antibiotics (Table 1).

Inappropriate antibiotic prescribing in the United States is a common problem and imposes a significant cost on society in two ways. First, it increases the rate at which bacteria that are resistant to clinically important antibiotics emerge and spread both in hospitals and the community. And second, it comes in the way of the patient being treated for the true underlying cause of disease.

Antibiotic resistance is a challenge that calls for good science as well as ingenuity. Although we will always need new antibiotics, there are alternative therapeutic approaches worth considering. One example is bacteriophage therapy. Bacteriophages—or "phages"—exist in abundance in nature, including in and on the human body. Phages are viruses that infect bacteria and use the bacterial cell’s genetic apparatus to produce more phages. In the process, they kill their host.

The federal government has a responsibility to act, but without anyone clearly positioned to lead federal programs to combat antimicrobial resistance it is nearly impossible for all of these different actors to coordinate their activities to create a systematic national response.

This brief highlights the strong link between flu and antibiotic prescription. According to recent research, “from 1995 through 2002, 26 percent of patients—just over one-quarter of them—who were diagnosed with flu were prescribed antibiotics. And that excludes people whose diagnosis could plausibly include a bacterial infection in addition to or associated with the flu...

Every year in the United States, 2 million people become infected with Staphylococcus aureus bacteria—“staph”—and 100,000 of those people die. Skin infections are most common, but staph infections of the lung (pneumonia) and bloodstream (bacteremia) are the deadliest. A vaccine would save lives and money, reduce the use of antibiotics, and slow the spread of antibiotic resistance. That is, if a vaccine is targeted to people when their risk of becoming infected with staph is highest—when they go to the hospital for surgery

Extending the Cure looks at recently approved and late- stage development antibiotics to determine gaps in supply warranting enhanced research and development.

Extending the Cure compares MRSA in communities with the MRSA that has plagued hospitals for decades.

Extending the Cure provides an overview of state and national bills introduced in 2007 legislative sessions aimed at reducing antibiotic resistance

Extending the Cure compares two recent studies that, despite using different methods and data, both find that MRSA is a serious issue throughout the United Sta