But just as important, we need to develop new treatments. Bacteria figure out a way to become resistant to every new drug. We are in an endless life-or-death struggle with bacteria.

The big problem is profitability. Unlike drugs for cholesterol or high blood pressure, or insulin for diabetes, which are taken every day for life, antibiotics tend to be given for a short time, a week or at most a few months. So profits have to be made on brief usage. Furthermore, any new antibiotics that might be developed to fight these drug-resistant bacteria are likely to be used very sparingly under highly controlled circumstances, to slow the development of resistant bacteria and extend their usefulness. This also limits the amount that can be sold.

Even though antibiotics are lifesaving, they do not command a premium price in the marketplace. As a society we seem willing to pay $100,000 or more for cancer drugs that cure no one and at best add weeks or a few months to life. We are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for knee surgery that, at best, improves function but is not lifesaving. So why won’t we pay $10,000 for a lifesaving antibiotic?

The reasons are unclear. Maybe it is that they were initially developed in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, when prices for health care services were lower and the idea that they should be cheap stuck. And maybe we have become complacent about being able to fight infections. We know people who have died of heart attacks, cancer and Alzheimer’s. We fear these diseases for ourselves. But maybe because few of us fear dying from bacterial infections, we don’t seem willing to pay large sums for their treatment.

Congress has tried to address the problem. In 2012, it passed an act that expedited F.D.A. review and gave drug companies five more years of market exclusivity without generic competition. That has increased drug company interest in developing antibiotics, but not enough. Let’s use prize money. What if the United States government — maybe in cooperation with the European Union and Japan — offered a $2 billion prize to the first five companies or academic centers that develop and get regulatory approval for a new class of antibiotics? As the XPrize — a foundation that runs competitions to spur innovations for difficult problems that often aren’t being addressed — and others have demonstrated, prizes for lofty goals can catalyze the creation of hundreds of unexpected research teams with novel approaches to old challenges. The prestige, bragging rights and renewed sense of mission created by such a prize would alone make an investment in research worthwhile.