What is a superbug?

Every 15 minutes, someone in the United States dies of a superbug that has learned to outsmart even our most sophisticated antibiotics, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
    That’s about 35,000 deaths each year from drug-resistant infections, according to the landmark report.
    The report places five drug-resistant superbugs on the CDC’s "urgent threat" list—two more germs than were on the CDC’s list in 2013, the last time the agency issued a report on antibiotic resistance.
    Genetic research shows germs have become especially adept at teaching each other how to outwit antibiotics.
    "Some miracle drugs no longer perform miracles," according to the report.
    The report also notes that while superbug infections in hospitals are down, some infections caught elsewhere—anywhere in the community—have increased.
    "The CDC is concerned about rising resistant infections in the community, which puts more people at risk and makes spread more difficult to identify and contain—and threatens the progress made to protect patients in health care," according to the new report.
    Some superbugs circulating in the community have figured out how to "teach" each other how to fight off antibiotics by sharing their resistance genes with each other.
    The answer to the antibiotic resistance crisis is not more powerful antibiotics, according to the new report.
    Antibiotics are slow to come to market, and germs will one day render them ineffective anyway, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield notes in his introduction to the report.
    "We need to adopt aggressive strategies that keep the germs away and infections from occurring in the first place," Redfield wrote.
    The key is to use antibiotics less. With less exposure, germs have fewer opportunities to learn how to fight them.
    CDC estimates that about a third of prescriptions for antibiotics in emergency rooms and doctors’ offices were given for infections that didn’t need them. That’s 47 million unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions each year.