Health care providers are in a constant battle with bacteria, and must reach for new weapons whenever they adapt and drugs no longer work on them. But those antibiotic-resistant bacteria are becoming more common.

Health officials raised an alarm recently about the proliferation of a type of drug-resistant bacteria now showing up in the U.S., although only a few cases have been seen so far this year in South Carolina and in Charleston.

But there are only a couple of drugs that still work on it, and doctors say the time is now to plan how to handle it. One solution is to stop giving the more powerful drugs to patients with less serious bacteria, which conserves them for the hard-to-treat cases.

As resistance has grown among bacteria adapting to other drugs, one class of antibiotics that d

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