More Drugs, Better Bugs

More than ninety thousand real people and up to two and a half million lesser breeds could die over the next thirty years from infections which resist antibiotics. The extensive use of antibiotic drugs, which is preferred over preventive hygiene as the healthier policy for pharmaceutical companies, has brought about an evolutionary spurt among the pathogens, doubtless thanks to the same intelligent designer who thought up polio, bubonic plague and Iain Duncan Smith. The anticipated excess death toll of three thousand Britons a year will be slightly less than the bag from the Conservative Party's clean air policy, and like the Johnson Doctrine on pollution it is expected mainly to affect the expendable orders, always assuming that heat exhaustion, flooding, starvation and social unrest don't thin out the seething masses in advance.