Penicillin was discovered by Fleming in the 1920s and used on patients 20 years later and completely revolutionized patient care (MedicalNewsToday). Antibiotics are miracle drugs allowing patients to survive from what could have been potentially lethal. Now less than a century later our world could be facing a life, again, without the use of antibiotics due to- intense global antibiotic resistance. Why? How? Can we stop it?
Antibiotic resistance is due to an evolutionary arms race between us and bacteria but we are to blame for how quickly this has emerged. Unfortunately antibiotics have been misused for decades (MedicalNewsToday). Doctors have been overprescribing, prescribing for illnesses not caused by bacteria, and patients have not been taking the antibiotics responsibly. All of these misuses have lead to an unfortunate reality that we are now having to deal with. In the article The rise of superbugs: Facing the antibiotic resistance crisis states that more than 2.8 million people in the US experience an infection from antibiotic resistant bacteria each year. What makes matters worse is that we are not just facing bacteria that are resistant to one antibiotic but rather multiple, these are Superbugs. For example bacteria from the enterobacteriaceae family, antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea and clostridioides difficile are being referred to as Nightmare bacteria in the article The ‘post-antibiotic era’ is here: Drug-resistant superbugs sicken 2.8M and kill 35K each year. The bacteria’s conjugative abilities of moving their R-plasmids (plasmids which contain multiple resistant genes that can be transferred from one bacteria to another.)
The future of antibiotic use looks a little more careful as we are now understanding the harmful effects of misuse and overuse. So how do we confront this? of course the development of new drugs is the obvious answer to this question, but resistance to any drug is inevitable- that is just how evolution and biology works!(MedicalNewsToday). So the answer to avoiding resistance lies outside of making new antibiotics and pushing for more research in preventative measure like vaccines or combating the infections with bacteriophages and antibodies (MedicalNewsToday). I think with acceptance of vaccines worldwide we could make a huge difference. I am also excited and interested about fighting bacterial infections with viral bacteriophages but of course we would have to figure out how to manipulate the interaction between the virus and the bacteria to make sure the therapeutic window stays high. The present situation with antibiotic resistance is scary and uneasy to anyone who is educated, but with uneasiness brings change and innovation, and so I am hopeful for the future.
Kelly Short's Blog 