Are we loshing the war against bacterial disease? The past 35 years have seen only one new class of bacteria-fighting drugs come to market, and a solo entrant at that―Pfizer's Zyvox. Medicine needs new antibiotics more than ever. Drug-resistant strains of everything from tuberculosis to staphylococcus are killing tens of thousands of patients every year. Penicillin is now useless against one-third of all Streptococcus pneumoniae, a common cause of pneumonia, meningitis and ear infections. The cost of treating resistant infections may be as much as $30 billion annually. "There are a number of organisms where we're one antibiotic away from a worldwide disaster," says Hank A. McKinnell, chief executive of Pfizer.
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