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Antibiotic overprescription is a minor cause compared to agriculture. The amount of antibiotic from farm run-offs entering the environment is astronomical. The way to evolve resistance is chronic low level exposure and that is basically what farms do in huge radii around their point locations. There are also two parts: initial evolution of resistance (point mutations, gene loss, expression changes, etc..) and resistance gene transfer. The latter is a more concerning problem because many environmental soil bacteria are resistant to a lot of antibiotics naturally but they aren't pathogens. In humans those bugs aren't present, but on farms you mix those antibiotic resistance source bacteria with opportunistic and pathogenic bacteria in animals and their poo poo and then mix in farmers. All the components are there, which is why most people that are patient 0 for these terrible bacteria are farmers. Some soil bacterium develops resistance, its DNA gets transferred in to another bacterium through a number pf mechanisms and then that second bacterium starts an opportunistic infection by chance in a farmer through a scrape or whatever and then if we're all very unlucky that bug then gives its DNA to a human pathogen that was also in the farmer at the time and now we have a crisis. Also phage therapy is cool because when you need have anew resistant bacterium you just go down to the ocean and scoop up another trillion phage in a couple mL of water to use for plaque forming assays. cowofwar fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Mar 14, 2017 |
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Mar 14, 2017 15:50
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To be fair our treated sewage effluent is jam packed with antibiotics (and other pharmaceuticals). You can imagine the problem in other countries where antibiotics are unregulated and sewage isn't treated. Just massive dumping of sub MIC levels of antibiotics in to the environment.
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Mar 28, 2017 20:57
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