>>>Penicillin still works, and all the talk about the broad spectrum antibiotics etc is mostly sales pitch.
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>Nope. Penicillin is effectively useless against many organisms- even Staph Aureus for at least two decades to my certain knowledge. Rely on penicillin to treat infections = people die, simple as that. Staph also has developed resistance against newer variants which is what the hospital super bug/MRSA scare is all about.

If it's useless, why are they still selling it here? Why is it manufactured at all?

And if the resistant strains are so prevalent, why are they still administering antibiotics to cattle? Wouldn't that expose more strains to the known antibiotics and just open the stage for new resistant strains?

>>>Also, now even here you can't buy it in a regular pharmacy without a prescription, by a simple hospital fiat, a little memo that was passed to retail. No law was changed. And the explanation was that same yarn about resistant strains etc. At the same time, you can buy the same antibiotics if you say you need it for your dog or cat. Or cow, for that matter. When they feed cattle antibiotics, you don't hear the industry complaining about creating resistant strains.
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>Certainly it sounds as if overuse of antibiotics in animals is causing resistance. So? Two wrongs don't make a right.

Just sayin' it doesn't quite add up. And all the infections we had in the family in the last dozen years were cured by those simple antibiotics, mostly versions of penicillin. That accounts also for the years we lived on the west side of the puddle.

>They make a big return otherwise it's not worth the risk. The problem today is there have been no new classes of antibiotics since the 1980s and it's not good business to take the risk. Meanwhile NDM-1 starts to make even the most powerful carbapenems obsolete. Seems to me we may have cause to regret resenting pharmaceutical profits once the worst happens.

Their practices are well over the top, and are basically extortion. We may regret letting them get away with that. It would be interesting to compare their figures for actual research vs those for advertising, bribing and litigation.