Last month, Frieden released a report estimating that at least 2 million Americans get infections each year that are resistant to antibiotics and that at least 23,000 people die as a result. Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization, warned last year: “A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.”

The words of Frieden and Chan ought to make our hair stand on end. But my reporting for the documentary “Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,” which is to air Tuesday on PBS’s “Frontline,” suggests that past warnings about antimicrobial resistance were largely discarded. This is not a threat that causes people to jump out of their chairs. It always seems to be someone else’s problem, some other time. …

But politically, there is no active constituency — no patient groups marching in the streets. We take antibiotics for a short period and then forget about them. And hospitals, which can be cauldrons for resistant bacteria, often remain silent about infections and outbreaks out of concern for adverse publicity and patient privacy. Yet another dimension of the crisis is that the economics of drug development have led major pharmaceutical firms to abandon research into new antibiotics while they pursue more lucrative therapies for chronic disease. The antibiotic pipeline is slowly drying up.