Western firms are becoming interested in a Soviet medicine

t was on the golf course that Barry Rud first noticed something was seriously wrong. A trim 60-year-old who played hockey as a young man, he found himself unable to take more than a few steps without gasping for breath. His doctors said he had caught a strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, one of the growing number of “superbugs” that have evolved resistance to many common antibiotics.

Mr Rud’s experience illustrates a growing problem—and one possible solution to it. Antibiotics are among medicine’s most spectacular achievements. A class of “silver bullet” drugs that destroy disease-causing bacteria while sparing the patient’s own cells, they have defanged all sorts of once-feared illnesses, from cholera to syphilis.