Bacteria are laughing at us!

I came across a nice article in the October issue of the Atlantic titled Resistance is Futile. It attempts to describe the problem of antibiotic resistance from an economic viewpoint. While I don’t understand all those nuances, despite my couple semesters of economics in college, I still think it’s an overall good read. I loved the introduction especially as I wrote a term paper on tuberculosis in literature for my Medicine & Literature seminar in college. Back then I was fascinated with the thought that the popularity of the powdered white face, red cheek, and dainty handkerchief carrying of Victorian era folks could have had anything to do with trying to mask the scourge of  tuberculosis.

Think about it.

So romantic, huh.

Patients, or their families, love to ask me  “How did I get this [resistant] infection?” and I want to say quite simplistically that “you know we are mostly bacteria right? and as we eat that juicy steak from that antibiotic-fed cow
(as just one example) we expose our microbial fauna to all those antibiotics, so is it really any surprise”? Or “you know that bacteria have been around for eons right, and antibiotics (in the modern sense) only for 70-80 years so clearly they have the advantage” but nobody wants their infectious disease specialist to have a lackadaisical defeatist attitude.

But I can’t lie. Infections happen. They are not going away anytime soon. So we need to be judicious in how we use the antibiotics that are in our current arsenal. We are not the smartest things on this earth after all.

In either case, here’s an excerpt from the Atlantic article:

“What people might not know about resistance,” says Eric Utt, a
former antibiotic researcher now working in Pfizer’s science
public-policy division, “is that the resistant organisms are already
there. This is why we find bacteria that are resistant to new
antibiotics, even before those drugs reach the market.” They’re often
the loners in the corner with the mutation that just happens to confer
immunity to some super-drug. When we bombard their competition with
lethal weapons, they get the place to themselves, and eventually, they
take over. After generations of this, the super-drug loses its
effectiveness.

Worse, other drugs lose their effectiveness, because many
bacteria that are resistant to one drug will also resist other drugs in
the same class. We are now learning that bacteria trade genes with each
other promiscuously, even between different species, so that resistance
developed by one strain of bacteria can be acquired by another. The more
we use these drugs, the faster they begin to fail.

The entire article is a must-read!