However, as we use ever stronger and more diverse antibiotics, new and more powerful bacterial defence options have evolved, rendering some bacteria resistant to almost everything – the ultimate outcome being untreatable superbugs. This gene sharing process is natural and is a large part of what drives evolution. This allows them to change quickly, readily obtaining the ability to make proteins and other molecules that block the antibiotic’s effect.
Bacteria do this by sharing and acquiring defence genes, often from other bacteria in their environment. What is antibiotic resistance, and why does it develop?Įxposure to antibiotics puts stress on bacteria and, like other living organisms, they defend themselves. To understand the problem of resistance, we must go back to basics. Otherwise, the next pandemic might be worse than COVID-19.
It also requires global improvements in water quality, sanitation, and hygiene. If we can ensure cleaner water and safer food everywhere, the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria will be reduced across the environment, including within and between people and animals.Īs recent recommendations on AMR from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), and World Health Organization (WHO) suggest, to which David contributed, the “superbug problem” will not be solved by more prudent antibiotic use alone. Overall, use of antibiotics, antivirals, and antifungals clearly must be reduced, but in most of the world, improving water, sanitation, and hygiene practice – a practice known as WASH – is also critically important. This means that our ability to treat all sorts of infectious disease is increasingly hampered by resistance, potentially including coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. Here we focus on antibiotic resistant bacteria, but drug resistance also occurs in types of other microorganisms – such as resistance in pathogenic viruses, fungi, and protozoa (called antimicrobial resistance or AMR). But growing evidence suggests that environmental factors may be of equal or greater importance to the spread of antibiotic resistance, especially in the developing world. This sad story is shockingly common, especially in places where pollution is rampant and clean water is limited.įor many years, people believed antibiotic resistance in bacteria was primarily driven by imprudent use of antibiotics in clinical and veterinary settings. This means they are regularly exposed to millions of resistant genes and bacteria, including potentially untreatable superbugs. Unfortunately, this child also lives in a place with limited clean water and less waste management, bringing them into frequent contact with faecal matter. Somehow the child has acquired an antibiotic resistant infection – even to drugs to which they may never have been exposed. If a two-year-old child living in poverty in India or Bangladesh gets sick with a common bacterial infection, there is more than a 50% chance an antibiotic treatment will fail. Riccardo Mayer/ David W Graham, Newcastle University and Peter Collignon, Australian National University
Writing for The Conversation, Professor David Graham and Peter Collignon discuss the rise of antimicrobial resistance and how it could hamper treatment of new infectious diseases. Comment: Scientists are already fighting the next pandemic
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