On Thursday afternoon, Pennsylvania became the first state in America to find the so-called “nightmare bacteria” — a bug resistant to what doctors call antibiotics of last resort.

The superbug — a strain of E. coli that contained 15 different genes giving it antibiotic resistance — was found in the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old woman who visited a military outpatient clinic in April. It was caught by a Department of Defense system set up to scrutinize strains of the bacteria identified as particularly antibiotic-resistant.

The particulars of the woman’s diagnosis — namely that she hadn’t traveled in the last five months, and so must have contracted the superbug here, not overseas — has generated some dire pronouncements. In a downright frightening statement, CDC director Tom Frieden, the nation’s top public health official, said the news could mean “the end of the road” for modern medicine’s reliance on antibiotics.

That assessment isn’t to be taken lightly. But while Thursday’s news was a significant development, it wasn’t the first, second or even the thousandth shot in a battle that’s been raging for years.

The resistance factor, called MCR, found here has also been found in people, animals or meat in at least 20 countries across the world. And that’s because of our seemingly insatiable appetite for antibiotics.

The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, a 2014 report by the British government, found that global consumption of antibiotics rose by nearly 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. Much of that spike can be attributed to skyrocketing use in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report said, but countries like the United States aren’t blameless.

In 2013, American doctors wrote 268.6 million scripts for antibiotics, according to the CDC; about half of them were given out unnecessarily or inappropriately. And that doesn’t take into account the antibiotics that make their way into our food through livestock like cows, pigs and chickens. The drugs are used to promote growth and stave off diseases in factory farming, but they’re also a major contributing factor when it comes to the emergence of superbugs.

Last year, the CDC estimated that more than 23,000 Americans die each year from drug-resistant infections. By 2050, the British report projects, antimicrobial resistance worldwide will be responsible for 10 million deaths annually and will account for $20 trillion to $35 trillion in lost economic output.

We don’t need fear and panic in the face of this revelation and these projections. We need more systems like the DoD detection protocol that flagged the Pennsylvania sample.

And we need more awareness and education of the pitfalls of overprescribing and improper use — clinically and agriculturally — of these powerful drugs.

For the past 90 years, antibiotics have transformed human life expectancy and personal health for the better. If we don’t act decisively and cooperatively, they will spend the next 90 years rolling back those gains.