New York, Worried about an impending public health crisis, US government officials are considering offering financial incentives to the pharmaceutical industry, like tax breaks and patent extensions, to spur the development of vitally needed antibiotics.

While the proposals are still nascent, they have taken on more urgency as bacteria steadily become resistant to virtually all existing drugs at the same time that a considerable number of pharmaceutical giants have abandoned this field in search of more lucrative medicines. The number of new antibiotics in development is “distressingly low,” Dr Margaret A. Hamburg, the commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, said at a news conference last month. The world’s weakening arsenal against “superbugs” has prompted scientists to warn that everyday infections could again become a major cause of death just as they were before the advent of penicillin around 1940.

“For these infections, we’re back to dancing around a bubbling cauldron while rubbing two chicken bones together,” said Dr Brad Spellberg, an infectious disease specialist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Centre in Torrance, California.

About 100,000 Americans a year are killed by infections acquired in hospitals, many resistant to multiple antibiotics. Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the best known superbug, now kills more Americans each year than AIDS.

While the notion of directly subsidising drug companies may be politically unpopular in many quarters, proponents say it is necessary to bridge the gap between the high value that new antibiotics have for society and the low returns they provide to drug companies.

“There is a market failure,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, who said he was considering introducing legislation. “We need to look at ways to spur development of this market.”

Representative Phil Gingrey, a Georgia Republican and a physician, recently introduced the Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now bill, which would provide certain antibiotics with five extra years of protection from generic competition and speed the reviews of new antibiotics by the Food and Drug Administration.

Besides tax breaks and extra protection from competition, other ideas policy makers are considering include additional federal funding of research and guaranteed purchases by the government of new antibiotics.

The Obama administration is also taking some steps. The federal agency that oversees development of treatments for bioterrorism agents like anthrax is broadening its scope to encompass more common infections. The department of health and human services is considering creating an independent fund that would invest in small bio-defence companies.

Mr Ramanan Laxminarayan, who directs the Extending the Cure project on antibiotic resistance at Resources for the Future, a policy organisation, said the government should focus on conserving the effectiveness of existing antibiotics. That could be done by preventing unnecessary use in people and farm animals.

“There’s not a recognition yet that we should think about antibiotics as a natural resource and we should conserve them like we do fish,” Mr Laxminarayan, an economist, said.