ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE, once a worry, is now a reality. Doctors treating patients for such diseases as pneumonia or tuberculosis often have to try three or more different antibiotics before finding one that works. If things get worse, they may be totally unable to reverse some bacterial infections.

Bacteria learn how to defend themselves against antibiotics when they’re overexposed to them, rendering even potent drugs useless. To reverse this frightening trend, two steps are being called for more urgently than ever:

1. Stopping the overuse of antibiotics in humans. Almost 3 million pounds of antibiotics are prescribed to Americans annually, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. Many of these prescriptions are for viral infections (such as flu and colds), which antibiotics can’t help.

2. Halting the massive use of antibiotics in animal feed. The UCS estimates that a staggering 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics are fed to animals each year to prevent illness. Result: Bacteria are increasingly unaffected by these drugs.

Alarmed physicians are now speaking out loudly and in unison. Recently, the editors of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) called for a ban on all non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics in agriculture. One clincher was three studies published in the NEJM last winter on the public-health risks of pouring antibiotics into animal feed. Researchers tested ground chicken, turkey, beef and pork bought in supermarkets–and found that 20 percent of these grocery staples contained deadly salmonella. Worse, 84 percent of the contaminated samples were resistant to at least one antibiotic and more than half were resistant to at least three.

Reducing human overuse of antibiotics is equally vital, but may be simpler than suspected if a small new study holds true. It suggests that a quick doctor-patient conversation can do wonders. When people with bronchitis–typically a viral infection that antibiotics don’t help–were told about the pros and cons of antibiotic use, they often opted to forego the drugs, according to a report in the British Medical Journal (January, 2002).

Of 259 bronchitis patients studied, doctors found that only 47 of them needed antibiotics, and they were urged to take them. The other 212 didn’t, but they too were given a prescription. However, half of them were also told about the problems of antibiotic abuse and the natural course their viral infection would likely take. One quarter of those patients never filled the prescription. If those “results were extrapolated to national figures, 750,000 fewer courses of antibiotics would be prescribed each year,” say the researchers. And that’s just in the tiny U.K.