How to battle superbugs with viruses that “eat” them

Antibiotics are vital to modern medicine. Their ability to kill bacteria without harming the patient has saved billions of lives directly and made everything from caesarean sections to chemotherapy much safer. Life expectancy would drop by a third if they did not exist. But after decades of overuse their powers are fading. Some bacteria have evolved resistance, creating a growing army of “superbugs” against which there is no effective treatment. is expected to kill 10m people a year by 2050, up from around 1m in 2019.It would be unwise to rely on new antibiotics to solve the problem. The rate at which resistance emerges is accelerating. Some new drugs last only two years before bacteria devise countermeasures. When new antibiotics do arrive, doctors often hoard them, prescribing them only grudgingly and for short periods when faced with the most intransigent infections. That helps limit the spread of resistance to new drugs. But it also limits sales, making new antibiotics an unattractive proposition for most pharmaceutical firms.