Now if you ask me, the idea of treating a penicillin-resistant organism with penicillin seems faintly ridiculous…  like an iron with drawing pins on the sole plate. Either the bug is resistant (which to me means it resists dying when I use the drug) or it isn’t (so it will die) but it seems that this may not be as straightforward as it seems.

The suggestion, from Vanessa Clifford and Marc Teebrugge in Australia, is that perhaps we can keep on going with penicillin, and they are seeking evidence to back up this assertion.

Now if it is true, my first suggestion would be to encourage microbiologists to start using words that tell us the truth (like “not very sensitive” or “little bit tougher” rather than “resistant” pneumococci), and my second would be to keep using penicillin regardless of what the report says.