It's actually really easy to handle the problem, you have a few sets of anti-biotics and you rotate through sets every 5 years.

Furthermore in Hospitals you make people wash their hands (as in you post security gaurds at the hand washing stations and none shall pass a station without washing) and you have separate wards for those with MRSA and those without MRSA.

If you need an antibiotic that is not in rotation, you are hospitalized while everyone makes sure you take your full course.

Doing these things eliminates about 90% of the problem.

There are other problems. There are doctors that give antibiotics for obviously viral infections, just to give the patients some assurance.

There are third world countries that don't care and will not follow any of those rules. Also foreign prison systems, particularly in Russia, which breed TB.

Then there are people that are prescribed low doses of antibiotics for things like acne. I imagine that's a huge risk more than all the other things, taking it every single day.

And, as others have mentioned, agriculture uses about 50% of the world's supply of antibiotics IIRC, and that's not really safe.

That was precisely my point. What to do isn't the problem, as you pointed out so succinctly, it's really easy to solve this problem technically. What's the issue here? People and businesses they own aren't following the "optimal" plan, thus it is more of a social issue in getting everybody on the same page.

Doing these things is also expensive in several ways. We have collectively decided that the cost/benefit is not worth it.

It's much easier to make antibiotics prescription only. Which we have. For humans at least.

> We have collectively decided that the cost/benefit is not worth it.

I don't think the decision has been conscious.

More importantly the costs and benefits haven't been amortised over the life (and impact) of those decisions. Or, if you will, it hasn't been worth it yet. Unfortunately at the point where we can properly assess the enormous cost of these decisions, the opportunity will be long gone.

It is absolutely conscious. Mainly conscious by politicians and lobbyists, who are high powered but generally fail a science literacy test. And our population, we, are the ones electing them.