Author and journalist Maryn McKenna in her “Superbug” blog on Wired.com examines U.S. spending on drug-resistant pathogens, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). She examines data presented by Eli Perencevich of the University of Iowa and colleagues at the World HAI Forum, which looked at how much of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ budget went to the problem of drug-resistant diseases versus other infectious diseases. “They found the answer to be: Not very much,” she writes.

With the WHO, the CDC, the Lancet, major medical societies, and two bills in Congress recognizing the importance of drug-resistant pathogens, “[y]ou’d think, with all those calls for attention, that combating antibiotic resistance would be a priority in the United States. But if we can take how much we spend to research a problem as a gauge of how much we care about it, then antibiotic resistance is no priority at all,” McKenna writes (7/5).