When Drugs Stop Working

View videos, photos and statistics from the Associated Press

In a five-part series, "When Drugs Stop Working," the Associated Press explores the global issue of drug resistance focusing on how the crisis was created and efforts currently employed to help save the effectiveness of our critical medicines.

The series documents the alarming rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria and the associated global health crisis - traveling from the U.S. farmbelt to HIV clinics in South Africa.

Read the whole series below:

• TB comes back stronger
  Peru/Florida

  Juarez's strain — so-called extremely drug-resistant (XXDR) TB — has never before been seen in the United States, said Dr. David Ashkin, one of the nation's leading experts on tuberculosis. XXDR tuberculosis is so rare that only a handful of other people in the world are thought to have had it.

  Forty years ago, the world thought it had conquered TB and any number of other diseases through the new wonder drugs: antibiotics.

  Today, all the leading killer infectious diseases on the planet — TB, malaria and HIV among them — are mutating at an alarming rate, hitchhiking their way in and out of countries. The reason: overuse and misuse of the very drugs that were supposed to have saved us.

• New Form of Malaria Threatens Thai-Cambodia Border
  Cambodia

  This spot on the Thai-Cambodian border is home to a form of malaria that keeps rendering one powerful drug after another useless. This time, scientists have confirmed the first signs of resistance to the only affordable treatment left in the global medicine cabinet for malaria: Artemisinin.

  If this drug stops working, there's no good replacement to combat a disease that kills 1 million annually. As a result, earlier this year international medical leaders declared resistant malaria here a health emergency.

• Pressure Rises to Stop Antibiotics in Agriculture
  Midwest United States

  Like Kremer, more and more Americans -- many of them living far from barns and pastures -- are at risk from the widespread practice of feeding livestock antibiotics. These animals grow faster, but they can also develop drug-resistant infections that are passed on to people. The issue is now gaining attention because of interest from a new White House administration and a flurry of new research tying antibiotic use in animals to drug resistance in people.

  ''This is a living breathing problem, it's the big bad wolf and it's knocking at our door,'' said Dr. Vance Fowler, an infectious disease specialist at Duke University. ''It's here. It's arrived.''

• South African Doctor Sees Drug-Resistant HIV
  South Africa

  Rossouw is on the front lines of a new battle in the fight against HIV: The drugs that once worked so well are starting not to work. And now the resistance is showing up in sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of the world's 33 million HIV cases.

  Ten years ago, between 1 percent and 5 percent of HIV patients worldwide had drug resistant strains. Now, between 5 percent and 30 percent of new patients are already resistant to the drugs. In Europe, it's 10 percent; in the U.S., 15 percent.

• Solution to Killer Superbug Found in Norway
  Norway

  Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway's public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutting back severely on the use of antibiotics.

  Now a spate of new studies from around the world prove that Norway's model can be replicated with extraordinary success, and public health experts are saying these deaths -- 19,000 in the U.S. each year alone, more than from AIDS -- are unnecessary.