Comment by mschuster91

> If we stopped using a certain antibiotic tomorrow and didn't start using it for another 50 years, we'd find that most if not all of the resistant bacteria would've lost that resistance as they'd evolved new traits.

The problem is, for most of the multiresistant species we don't have anything we can use in the 50 years we need to wait for one resistance to be outcompeted. And we haven't discovered any major new class of agents in decades as we cut back foundational research, which makes the situation worse - we don't just have substances, we don't have the pipeline to develop substances.

Sure, for bacteria we got phage therapy, but we lost a lot of the knowledge there during the collapse of the USSR, not all bacteria are suitable for phage usage, phages have their own side effects (including our immune system attacking the phages as well), and we have mRNA based vaccines but these act too late (when the patient has already caught the pathogen) and are useless in immunosuppressed patients such as organ transplant receivers and some cancer patients.