Antibiotic Resistance News In Health
Think about a world where antibiotics no longer control disease. If it doesn’t scare you, it ought to.
The fact is, more and more disease-causing microbes have become resistant to drug therapy. A few of them are:
- tuberculosis
- gonorrhea
- malaria
- E. coli causing urinary tract infections (UTIs)
- pneumococcus (cause of ear infections, pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis)
- enterococcus (a common hospital acquired infection)
- bacteria causing childhood ear infections
There is also an increased incidence of staph and MRSA infections that have been news in health.
The fact is, people are dying of infections that were once treatable with antibiotics.
Bad News In Health Care – For Bacteria, Resistance is NOT Futile!
So, how do germs – known also as microbes or bacteria – become resistant to antibiotics in the first place?
It’s like this – bacteria have an innate ability to evade containment and destruction by drugs. How? Mostly by a very rapid rate of reproduction and the genetic mutations that go along with that. Since bacteria reproduce by the billions, and mutations are inevitable, that means there are lot of different mutations, and some of them are bound to be ones that will make the bacteria resistant to antibiotics.
Then when antibiotics are used to treat an infection caused by those particular bacteria, the ones that have the mutation for resistance will survive. Further, they will not only survive, they will be fruitful and multiply.
That means every time someone is treated with an antibiotic, the punier bacteria are killed, but those that are mutated to resist the antibiotic will survive and thrive. Then the next time an antibiotic is used on those particular microbes, there’s trouble. More can resist and the infection being treated does NOT go away!
Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Are Inevitable
Because of the constant mutations and the fact the antibiotic resistant bacteria are the ones to survive, that means sooner or later, the bacteria strain on a whole will have changed so much that the drug once used to treat infections caused by that particular strain is no longer effective. The majority of those bacteria have become antibiotic resistant.
This is a serious matter. What scientists have now realized is that it’s not a question of whether a germ might become resistant to antibiotics, it’s a question of WHEN . It’s now considered a given that bacteria will ALL become resistant to the antibiotics used to treat the infections they cause. With each particular combination of bacteria strain vs. antibiotic, it’s just a matter of WHEN it will happen.
The news in health from the FDA is, “Unless antibiotic resistance problems are detected as they emerge, and actions are taken to contain them, the world could be faced with previously treatable diseases that have again become untreatable, as in the days before antibiotics were developed.”
Back to the days of people dying from infection? A threatening dilemma indeed.
FDA Consumer Magazine, Sept. 1995
www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/anti_resist.html
www3.niaid.nih.gov/topics/antimicrobialresistance/
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in antimicrobial resistance. The Journal of Infectious Diseases DOI: 10.1086/533451
Nutrition Action Health Letter, October 2008
