Until three months ago, Thomas M. Dukes was a vigorous, healthy executive at a California plastics company. Then, over the course of a few days in December as he was planning his Christmas shopping, E. coli bacteria ravaged his body and tore his life apart.

Mr. Dukes is a reminder that as long as we’re examining our health
care system, we need to scrutinize more than insurance companies. We
also need to curb the way modern agribusiness madly overuses
antibiotics, leaving them ineffective for sick humans.

Antibacterial drugs were revolutionary when they were introduced in the
United States in 1936, virtually eliminating diseases like tuberculosis
here and making surgery and childbirth far safer. But now we’re seeing
increasing numbers of superbugs that survive antibiotics. One of the
best-known — MRSA, a kind of staph infection — kills about 18,000 Americans annually. That’s more than die of AIDS.

Mr.
Dukes, 52, picked up a kind of bacteria called ESBL-producing E. coli.
While it’s conceivable that he touched a contaminated surface, a likely
scenario is that he ate tainted meat, said Dr. Brad Spellberg, an
infectious-diseases specialist and the author of “Rising Plague,” a book about antibiotic resistance.

Vegetarians
are also vulnerable to antibiotic resistance nurtured in hog barns.
Microbes swap genes, so antibiotic resistance developed in pigs can
jump to microbes that infect humans in hospitals, locker rooms, schools
or homes.

Routine use of antibiotics to raise livestock is
widely seen as a major reason for the rise of superbugs. But Congress
and the Obama administration have refused to curb agriculture’s
addiction to antibiotics, apparently because of the power of the
agribusiness lobby.