Western firms are becoming interested in a Soviet medicine

It was on the golf course that Barry Rud first noticed something was seriously wrong. A trim 60-year-old who played hockey as a young man, he found himself unable to take more than a few steps without gasping for breath. His doctors said he had caught a strain of , one of the growing number of that have evolved resistance to many common .Mr Rud’s experience illustrates a growing problem—and one possible solution to it. Antibiotics are among medicine’s most spectacular achievements. A class of “silver bullet” drugs that destroy disease-causing bacteria while sparing the patient’s own cells, they have defanged all sorts of once-feared illnesses, from cholera to syphilis. They have drastically reduced the risks of surgery (patients often died from infections caught on the surgeon’s table) and chemotherapy, which destroys the patient’s immune system.