Antibiotics: Are They Still Working?

Antibiotics. Antibiotics have been seen for years as an important aspect of healthcare. Antibiotics are used in order to combat various diseases seen in humans, but they have also been useful in animals. Recent studies regarding humans has shown an impending danger resulting from bacterial mutations that cause bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. Because of this, antibiotics are slowly becoming less effective, and eventually could become completely useless against dangerous bacteria. Another science journal also discusses how antibiotic resistance is becoming more prevalent in animals as well, which could lead to problems with livestock around the world.

A recent article by Science Magazine made a rather frightening claim associated with recent findings related to antibiotic resistance. The magazine states that “evolution experiments have shown that tolerance evolves quickly under cyclic antibiotic treatments.” In this article, patients were studied who had contracted methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) blood infections. The first patient was shown to have S. aureus that had developed resistance to a certain antibiotic known as rifampicin (RIF). The resistance to certain antibiotics tends to stem from mutations that occur within the bacteria that cause certain strains to survive and multiply even in the presence of antibiotics. This article then went on to discuss the importance of continued research into antibiotic resistance in order to determine the best ways to use antibiotics well that may continue to help people around the world.

The antibiotic resistant problem as stated earlier is also becoming an issue in animals. In some cases, studies have shown that antibiotic-resistant bacteria may not be growing, but instead antibiotic resistance genes are. The current problem with these is that many can be found in dairy manure, and they become very difficult to regulate. This surprised me because I did not even think about how genes could persist in bacteria in that way. Overall, it is very important both for the food we eat and for the lives that we live, for us to continue to research and work to better understand antibiotics and antibiotic resistance.