Every franchisee attends "Bug U" for classes in accounting, customer service, marketing and treating bacterial strains.

FORBES: Germ warfare

Ineffectiveness aside, broad exposure to the drugs only speeds the rise of immune bacterial strains.

CNN: FIGHTING SUPERBUGS

They included streptomycin, tetracycline and erythromycin, antibiotics still in use today, though they easily get outflanked by resistant bacterial strains.

FORBES: Germ Warfare

In theory, disease could also spread if the animal microbes pass their drug-resistant genes to human bacterial strains.

BBC: Animals and antibiotics: the risks

In the lab Glaxo has screened it against 2, 000 bacterial strains from around the world and not found one that is resistant.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Drug-resistant bacterial strains are created in hospitals because not only is there a large population of weakened patients with open wounds to infect, but the use of antibiotics is widespread.

BBC: UK top of superbug league

As the viruses change color once they've reached impervious bacterial strains, in this case variants on Staphylococcus, they can reveal superbugs within 10 to 12 minutes -- a potentially lifesaving interval when current purification-driven methods can take hours.

ENGADGET

Sequenom is developing a high-speed "bacterial fingerprinting" technique based on mass spectrometry that can be used to rapidly identify the DNA of subtly different strains of bacteria or viruses.

FORBES: Biotechs See Dollar Signs In War