The antibiotic challenge: overuse and need for new ones.

Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Dr. Jay K. Varma’s reports in your inbox a day early.Hello and welcome to Healthbeat’s weekly report on stories shaping public health in the United States.I am Dr. Jay K. Varma, a physician, epidemiologist, and public health expert currently serving as chief medical officer at Fedcap, a national nonprofit focused on economic mobility and well-being for vulnerable communities. Views expressed here are my own.Antibiotics are one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. They made it safer for humans to do virtually every normal activity: breath air, drink water, eat food, and have sex. In fact, we now depend on antibiotics so much that we now face a vexing situation: We need to start taking fewer antibiotics, and we need to start making more of them.In this week’s report, I review a new research finding that even a single course of antibiotics may disturb our body, the over-prescribing of antibiotics by dentists, and new Food and D