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| President Barack Obama |
President Obama is cracking down on so-called superbugs, those that cause deadly antibiotic-resistant infections, with an executive order that will establish a task force to combat the problem. The move coincides with a new report by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which proposes ways to speed drug development of new antibiotics and make clinical trials of these drugs more efficient in light of a dried-up global pipeline. The efforts mainly focus on antibiotics in the medical space, and some groups say they don't go far enough to curb the use of antibiotics in animals used for food, which has been cited as a major source of antimicrobial resistance in humans. More