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Yes, average people are dying in the streets. Hospital infections, many of which are caused by resistant organisms, are a major cause of death in the United States.

Beyond that, you now have things like extensively resistant Gonorrhea, which has taken a disease that is fairly common, but easy to treat if caught and thus embarrassing without being dangerous, and turned it into a serious problem, especially for women.

The answer for "How do we tell" is that epidemiologists (like me) do a lot of surveillance for antibiotic resistance. We ask why hospital patients died, and what organism killed them - and what is was susceptible to.

And the answer is this is a rather serious problem.



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