This week’s stunning announcement that scientists have found a previously unknown antibiotic in soil is good news indeed. Not since 1987 have any new antibiotics been ‘discovered.’ And the news, described as a game-changer, comes at an opportune time. Disease-causing organisms have become resistant to most of the medicines available today.

Who knew soil produced antibiotics? I certainly didn’t. Yet, according to the researchers at Northeastern University in Boston (whose study was profiled in the journal Nature), it’s the source of nearly all of them. Continue reading →