As concern for Zika virus ramped up in January, the recent and sudden recognition that last-ditch antibiotic resistance is moving across the globe has all but vanished from the news.

But it’s about to become important again. Two letters published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, the journal that has published all the revelations of the newly identified MCR-1 gene that protects bacteria from the last-resort antibiotic colistin, reveal a worrisome new development. In both humans and animals in China, bacteria have been found that harbor both MCR, and also NDM, the last perilous superbug gene, which confers resistance to a crucial class of drugs called carbapenems.

In the last set of publications about MCR several weeks ago, researchers revealed that bacteria with MCR resistance were doing the equivalent of assembling a