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A few important points about antibiotic resistance (as far as understood by a lay person that likes to read articles on the topic): 1) Resistance is inevitable
by jakobegger 10y ago
A few important points about antibiotic resistance (as far as understood by a lay person that likes to read articles on the topic):
1) Resistance is inevitable. It doesn't matter if everyone finishes their prescribed treatment or not, bacteria will develop resistance to antibiotics one way or another.
2) Antibiotic resistance comes at a cost to the bacteria. In the absence of antibiotics, bacteria will lose their resistance. It is pretty unlikely that you will get infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria when you bruise your knee in the dirt.
3) Multi-resistant bacterial infections mostly occur in a clinical setting, where people are especially vulnerable to infections (people on a respirator, people with a central venous line). You can prevent multi-resistant infections just like you prevent normal infections: Use sterile gloves, isolate people, follow procedure protocols precisely, etc.
Multi-resistant pathogens are a problem, but it's far from the doomsday scenario painted in those "it's the end of antibiotics" articles.
- morsch 10y agoPoints 1 and 2 seem contradictory.
- WildUtah 10y agoIf you could ban an antibiotic, bacteria would lose their resistance to it in time. Resistance consumes a lot of energy and the bacteria without it would simply outcompete the resistant varieties to quick extinction in a few thousand or million generations. But as long as people keep using the antibiotic, the bacteria will continue getting more resistant.
- edem 10y agoIt is not. Basically it says: "bacteria will get resistant with prolonged exposure, but lose resistance when they are no longer exposed."
- piratelax40 10y agobe very careful about semantics, the statement is: bacteria will become resistant overtime when exposed to antibotics at concentrations insufficient to kill all of them, however when removing the selective pressure of antibiotics, they will "lose" resistance as that selective pressure is no longer applied. As the poster above mentioned, energetically, resistance to antibiotics is costly, as bacteria will do things like increase the number of efflux pumps in their cell membranes pumping out antibiotics. When there are plenty of nutrients available as other strains have died, this is an acceptable tradeoff, however without that pressure, the strains with less defense mechanisms, but also need less nutrients to survive, will again outcompete and become dominant. Finally, just to reiterate, it is exposure at levels not high enough to kill all strains that causes resistance development. If you maintain concentrations so high that no strains can survive, resistance will never develop. Unfortunately, this is virtually impossible in practice, as adverse safety events would also occur too frequently at those 'scorched earth' levels.
- mtw 10y ago#3 - the lady who got caught the "superbug" while she was treated in india for a hip bone fracture. Hospitals and especially hospitals in India will not use sterile gloves or isolate patients with hip fractures. This means patients with common flu, injuries, or other benign health issues can also catch this bacteria, and a scenario where dozens of patients if not hundreds catching superbugs in an Indian hospital is likely.
- perlgeek 10y ago> 1) Resistance is inevitable. It doesn't matter if everyone finishes their prescribed treatment or not, bacteria will develop resistance to antibiotics one way or another. Not wrong, but it paints a pretty black and white picture of something that has a lot of shades of gray. The way we use antibiotics strongly influences how quick antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolve. With very good usage discipline you could even try to kill all resistant bacteria by use of different antibiotics before the bacteria become multi-resistant.