An article in Reuters paints a glum picture of the future of antibiotics as a tool for modern medicine. “The drugs don’t work – and neither does the market, when it comes to antibiotics.” Take gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease contracted by more than 100 million people a year: it used to be easily treatable but has now developed superbug strains that are drug-resistant and are spreading around the planet. Tuberculosis is a similar tale. Totally resistant forms of the lung infection emerged in India just a few years ago and have now been detected worldwide. Hospital patients in Africa with untreatable TB are often simply sent home to die. It’s a glimpse of what Britain’s chief medical officer Sally Davies calls the “apocalyptic scenario” of a post-antibiotic era, which the World Health Organization says will be upon us this century unless something drastic is done.

Waking up to the threat, governments and health officials are getting serious about trying to neutralize it. It may seem like a question of science, microbes and drugs – but in truth it is a global issue of economics and national security. The debate moved to center stage last week when British Prime Minister David Cameron launched a global review of the crisis, securing specific support from U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. That builds on a resolution passed at the World Health Assembly in Geneva in May recognizing the pressing need for the world to act in the fight to combat increasing resistance.

Britain’s chief medical officer Sally Davies said in an interview with Reuters “This is…not a science issue. This is an issue of markets and economics.”

In recent decades, drugmakers have slashed investment in antibiotics because of poor returns from a class of low-priced medicines that are only used for short periods, even as overuse of existing drugs has spurred the spread of resistance. As a result, the world’s biggest investor in the field today is a little-known U.S. firm, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, with an annual research budget for antibiotics of $400 million. The industry complains its bug-killing medicines are severely undervalued – and they have a point.

Just over a year ago, Johnson and Johnson won approval for the first drug in 40 years that provides a new way to treat TB, yet sales of Sirturo are forecast by analysts to total just $75 million this year. Compare that to Gilead Sciences’ new hepatitis C drug Sovaldi – carrying an eye-watering U.S. price tag of $1,000 per pill – which is tipped to sell more than $8 billion in 2014.

For companies like Cubist the current situation is not all doom and gloom. The exit of bigger players has reduced competition, while recent steps to ease the regulatory path to market have helped and the U.S. Generating Antibiotics Incentives Now (GAIN) Act now ensures some extra patent life. Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved two new drugs from Cubist and Durata Therapeutics for acute bacterial skin infections in the last two months. That’s encouraging but a more fundamental fix is still needed.