As living organisms, bacteria are encoded by DNA, and DNA occasionally mutates. Sometimes genetic mutations render a bacterium immune to an antibiotic’s chemical tactics. The few cells that might escape antibiotic pressure then have a sudden advantage: with their counterparts wiped out, resources abound, and the remaining antibiotic-resistant bacteria proliferate. It’s a problem not only for the host—you or me when we are treated with an antibiotic and develop a resistant strain—but also for anyone with whom we happen to share our resistant bacteria, say, on a door handle or keyboard. In fact, most resistant bacteria develop not in people but in livestock fed antibiotics to promote growth; these resistant bacteria infect people through contaminated animal products. This is how even antibiotic “naive” people come to be infected with resistant strains of bacteria.

I see this all the time as a family doctor. A woman has a urinary tract infection. I tell her that her bacteria are resistant to this or that antibiotic, and she says, “But I’ve never taken any of those.” Welcome to the global human soup.

  • girlfreddyOP
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    3 months ago

    From the article …

    WHILE PHAGE THERAPY was largely abandoned after the 1940s during the so-called golden age of antibiotics, microbiologists in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics continued using phages in research and clinical applications.

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 months ago

      One of my professors in university was a leading researcher in bacteriophage therapy. They did some amazing things in the 2000s with them, like elimination of only pathogenic strains of E. coli in livestock. I can only imagine what they could do with a budget more inline with pharmaceutical research than that available at a small state school that most students didn’t know had a sciences department.