I think we can settle for that. Bacteria are not going to stop evolving, and so long as it is theoretically possible for something to survive in a habitat - which it will be if human cells can live there - there is always some chance something will adapt to it. That applies even if 100% of current bacteria don’t survive treatment, although that would certainly reduce the chances.
So I don’t think we should be looking at this in terms of developing a technology to solve our problems, and then being done with them. Rather it’s an arms race we need to keep ahead in.
Bacteria always seem to be able to find ways of avoiding being killed by substances we discover. At present we are still one step of the microorganisms, but this need not always be so... -HJ Rogers, 1966
At the time, people were working hard on discovering new antibiotics, with one class after another introduced until around 1980 or so. And that’s what made the antibiotic era; penicillin and streptomycin started losing effectiveness a while ago. But there’s really no such thing as antibiotic resistance, just resistance to the ones we have, and we were making ourselves a moving target.
In contrast there have only been one or two major classes of antibiotics introduced in the last few decades. So bacteria have caught up, faster because of foolish practices that make that easier for them, but inevitably because governments and companies have stopped taking staying ahead so seriously. Without these decades of neglect, I doubt we would be seeing these problems now.
