Evolution Of Antibiotic Resistance Has Become Difficult

A trip to the doctor for an upper respiratory infection will often warrant the broad spectrum antibiotic amoxicillin or penicillin, which not only kills the strep it also kills a lot of other bacteria including in the digestive tract, which can have broad impacts with the stroke of a pen, it may even diminish your own future health by aiding bacteria to evolve resistance to antibiotics.

Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that there is a strong need to develop alternatives to antibiotics for small infections as bacteria will most likely evolve to render most antibiotics ineffective by midcentury according to reports, and strategies to make up for the shortfall projections have been failing thus far.

Drug development strategies have been focused on replacing antibiotics in extreme infections that without effective drugs increases the risk of death. The evolution of resistance does not happen nearly as often in those cases as compared to the multitude of the smaller infections such as tonsillitis, bladder infections, sinusitis, and bronchitis according to the researchers.

Prescription for smaller ailments account for around 90% of antibiotic use, thus making it more likely to be the driver in the evolution of resistance, as bacteria that survive these small battles grow in strength and numbers becoming formidable enemies in bigger infections.

Taking that antibiotic for your throat, could end up giving you gut bacteria that become super resistant because not only will it work in the throat it also travels to other areas such as the digestive tract. E.coli is widespread in the gut with some strains secreting enzymes with the ability to thwart off antibiotics. That broad spectrum antibiotic will only kill off the weaker more vulnerable less dangerous bacteria leaving the robust more dangerous bacteria to propagate. Should you later on have to have a surgery then you have an issue, or maybe even you give that robust resistant and stronger E.coli to a very young or elderly relative.

Far too often the superbugs make their way into hospitals via someone’s intestines, where they have been getting stronger and evolving high resistance through years of antibiotic treatments for the occasional small infection, where then these bacteria infect those with a weak immune system. Furious infection can then ensue which are basically becoming essentially invulnerable to antibiotics, followed by sepsis and even death.

Unfortunately drug developers are facing a downward and dwindling effectiveness of antibiotics against evolved bacteria and have been looking for alternative treatments They are looking to find a new class of drug that works better or as well as antibiotics but have not found any so far. The medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases published a paper in which study after study examined such alternative treatments such as bacteriocins, phage, and anti-virulence drugs not being able to rise to the challenge a hand, like a bad scorecard it was almost uniformly negative.

Researchers are proposing a different approach to save antibiotics for the really serious conditions only, that developing non-antibiotic therapies for smaller ones such as bladder infections, bronchitis, and strep throat could prove to be an easier task. Sometimes all it takes is a push back to the bacteria until the body’s immune system can take care of it. If enough alternatives to antibiotics for the multitude of smaller infections were available, it would reserve antibiotic effectiveness longer for more deadly but far less common infections for which they are most needed.