Should the government be subsidizing drug companies? In this case, yes.

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ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom has had an op-ed in today s Wall Street Journal, where he considers whether the U.S. government s unprecedented move to give $200 million over 5 years to GlaxoSmithKline to aid in their antibiotic develop effort is a good idea.

In an ideal world, this would be unnecessary, but thanks to misguided and prohibitive FDA regulations in the 1990s, almost all drug companies dropped out of antibiotic research, leaving us in a very precarious situation where routine infections are rapidly becoming untreatable.

Dr. Bloom notes. Predictably, drug companies have dropped out of the field. In 1990, 18 major pharmaceutical companies had antibacterial programs. Now there are four, and the results speak for themselves: Between 2010 and 2012, the FDA approved 95 new drugs. Of these, exactly one was a new systemic antibiotic.

You can read his op-ed in its entirety here.