Thanks in large part to FDA over-regulation, there is a paucity of new antibiotics. Yet antibiotic-resistant bacteria run rampant worldwide, ACSH’s Drs. Josh Bloom and Gilbert Ross write in an op-ed published in National Review Online. The number of new antibiotics being approved is negligible, and currently only four companies manufacture 80 percent of the world’s vaccines. Dr. Bloom and Dr. Ross point out that the FDA is mostly to blame for this predicament:
The drug regulators also began requiring that more patients be enrolled in clinical trials, increasing the cost of drug development. The results were predictable — drug companies dropped out of antibiotic research en masse.
Meanwhile, the bugs keep growing and mutating. If the resistance problem jumps ahead of the discovery process, we may again find ourselves with no reliable weapon against infection.