Preserving Antibiotics, Rationally

With 51 tons of antibiotics consumed daily in the United States, the selective pressure in favor of antibiotic-resistant pathogens is strong. Given the critical public health threat, an economically rational solution is to impose a user fee on nonhuman antibiotic use. Antimicrobial resistance is a critical threat to public health. The value of antibiotics for human health is immeasurable, but were one to try to measure, a plausible estimate of the increase in life expectancy attributable to antibiotics might be 2 to 10 years.(1) If we multiply this increase by 300 million Americans and a dollar value of, say, $100,000 per life-year, we arrive at an estimate for the worth of the current stock of antibiotics of $60 trillion to $300 trillion in the United States alone. Unfortunately, this stock is being gradually depleted owing to genetic mutations in bacteria and ...