For the past week or so, the news has been offering daily updates on the deadly Ebola virus. There have been reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and from medical experts describing how authorities are trying to stop the spread of the disease in the U.S. after the death of a Liberian man in a Dallas hospital and the later infection of a nurse who had cared for him.

There is no doubt that the Ebola virus must be dealt with seriously, most importantly defeated at its source in West Africa. But another medical story has been largely ignored despite growing alarm among health experts — the rise of antibiotic resistant germs.

Most people agree that an aggressive global response is needed in the battle against Ebola, which has killed about 4,000 people in Africa, and one person in the United States. But to put medical risks in perspective, the CDC estimates that 23,000 people were killed by antibiotic resistant diseases in the United States last year. It’s worth stating that Ebola is a virus, not a bacterial infection, so antibiotics are not effective in the Ebola fight.

Potential Ebola vaccines are being rushed into testing phase to respond to the worst outbreak in the 40 years since it was discovered. The rise in antibiotic-resistant diseases has been happening slowly over the past decade or two. Recently, there have been increasingly alarming reports about the consequences of the overuse of antibiotics by the medical profession as well as by the widespread use of antibiotics in large-scale farms and ranches producing beef, chicken and pork.

The warning is simple enough; the overuse of antibiotics leads to bacteria developing resistance — meaning the old medicines don’t work. The new mutations of the bugs are proving much more difficult to defeat with the existing array of antibiotic drugs with sometimes deadly results.

For decades, a trip to the doctor’s office with complaints of a sore throat or earache produced a quick prescription for antibiotics. More recently, though, many doctors, seeing the need to reduce the overuse of antibiotics, hold off on prescribing antibiotics until tests confirm the need. That’s encouraging.

Things are not encouraging on the agriculture scene, which is where 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are being used to encourage faster growth in animals raised for meat, there is little progress.

The federal Food and Drug Administration saw the problem with agricultural use of over-the-counter antibiotics and in 2013 issued a voluntary phase-out request to the industrial farming operators. But that program is not working — a report late last month found that the sale of antibiotics for farm animals is still growing rapidly.

Farmers and ranchers first used low-dose antibiotics to keep gorwing animals from getting sick in crowded, sometimes unsanitary, conditions. Soon the farmers discovered that farm animals actually grew faster, reaching to market weights quicker, with steady low-level consumption of antibiotics. These antibiotics are now a key ingredient in profits for industrial-scale farmers and ranchers, which will make it difficult to slow or stop.

The powerful farm lobby and its friends in Congress have fought restricting antibiotic use in farm animals. Still, consumer demand for meat free of antibiotics is growing and more meat producers are responding.

For decades, antibiotics were considered a “miracle drug,” easily curing people of diseases that once were deadly. But those wonder-drug traits are being lost as routine appearance of antibiotics allow the targeted bateria to survive by mutating to become resistant to the antibiotic drugs.

Making the problem worse is the lack of new antibiotics coming on the market. Because there is marginal profit potential in new antibiotic research, pharmaceutical companies put little-to-no effort into new medicines capable of defeating the evolving so-called superbugs. Government incentives can and should be used to spark development of new antibiotics, if the normal market driver, profit, is not there. It’s clearly a serious public health issue, with 23,000 mostly preventable deaths a year.

News coverage of Ebola should continue; it’s a deadly disease that can be stopped with greater awareness. But there should be ramped up awareness of antibiotic-resistant bugs and the dangers posed by overuse of antiobiotics by the medical profession and industrial farming and ranching.