You wouldn’t expect a quiet revolution in how we read antibiotic resistance data to start on a chicken farm in Hungary. But a look at enterococci pulled from poultry tells a story that reaches well past the barn. Here’s the uncomfortable part: just because a genome carries a resistance-looking gene, it doesn’t mean the bug is actually resistant. That gap between what a genome says and what a bacterium does is exactly where surveillance programs either catch real threats early or choke on false alarms. I keep coming back to this whenever someone forwards me a “resistance detected” alert. Let’s walk through what the data showed, why it’s so easy…