Antibiotic resistance is a fast-growing public health crisis, causing more than a million global deaths annually and contributing to nearly 5 million more. These infections are more difficult and more expensive to treat than typical infections, and are responsible for longer hospital stays, driving up costs for hospitals and patients alike. Treatment mostly comes down to guesswork on the part of physicians. Ara Darzi, a surgeon and director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, says AI-powered diagnostics offer a better way. “We're standing, right now, in 2026, at the first genuine inflection point in this crisis,” Darzi said on April 16 at WIRED Health in London. The overuse and misuse of antibiotics and a lack of new drug development have been fueling the rise of resistant microbes. When bacteria are exposed to levels of antibiotics that don't immediately kill them, they develop defense mechanisms to survive.…