Back in the day, there were only a handful of reliable antibiotics to choose from. But as more bugs have emerged, and more have become resistant to standard treatments, we’ve had to develop new drugs to fight them. The good news is that in 2018, the Food and Drug Administration approved a cadre of new antibiotics to confront the rising threat of superbugs, including eravacycline, plazomicin and omadacycline, and we can expect even more this year. But very few physicians know how to use these powerful new drugs. Many don’t even know how to pronounce them.

Infectious-disease specialists are often the only health care providers in a hospital — or an entire town — who know when to use all of the new antibiotics (and when to withhold them). These experts serve as an indispensable cog in the health care machine, but if trends continue, we won’t have enough of them to go around. The terrifying part is that most patients won’t even know about the deficit. Your doctor won’t ask a specialist for help because in some parts of the country, the service simply won’t be available. She’ll just have to wing it.

My family got a taste of how much this matters in 2017, when my father-in-law, Bill, learned he had an aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills many patients within a year. Not long after he was started on chemotherapy, Bill developed a fever. A potentially lethal bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, had entered his blood and soon leapt to his spine, leaving him partially paralyzed. His cancer treatments were put on hold to address the more immediate threat of an infection. But stopping chemotherapy gave the tumor a chance to grow, causing Bill’s chances of survival to plummet.

Death appeared imminent until he was transferred to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and put under the care of an infectious-disease specialist, who quickly devised a treatment plan that cured the infection and ultimately saved his life. Studies show that patients with Bill’s infection are more likely to survive hospitalization if an infectious- disease specialist is consulted. Others with his condition may not be so fortunate.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America and other professional organizations have devised aggressive recruitment and advocacy strategies, but there is far more work to be done. It begins with the recognition that infectious-disease doctors are overworked and underpaid. Our insurance system needs a better way to measure the value of diagnoses and treatments so that we can fairly reimburse doctors in cognitive specialties.

We must hurry. Superbugs are coming for us. We need experts who know how to treat them.

Matt McCarthy, an infectious-disease doctor at Weill Cornell, is the author of the forthcoming “Superbugs: The Race to Stop an Epidemic.”