The development over the past 65 years of drugs that kill infecting microbes without harming the patients infected has cured more illness and preserved more productive life than any other advance in the history of medicine. As treatment with each such antimicrobial agent became widespread, however, it usually began to fail as microbes became resistant to it. Replacing failing older agents was difficult in much of the world because newer agents were expensive. It is now difficult everywhere because new agents are not becoming available. Recognition of this growing health problem, of its cause by overuse of antimicrobials and its of epidemic spread led in 1998 to a World Health Assembly Resolution urging Member States to take steps to contain antimicrobial resistance and in 2001 to a WHO Global Strategy program that elaborates those steps...