Antibiotic Resistance 2

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passing decade, bacteria that defy not only single but multiple antibiotics -- and therefore are extremely difficult to control -- have become increasingly common.
What is more, strains of at least three bacterial species capable of causing life-threatening illnesses (Enterococcus faecalis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) already evade every antibiotic in the clinician's stockpile of more than 100 drugs. In part because of the rise in resistance to antibiotics, the death rates for some communicable diseases (such as tuberculosis) have started to rise again, after having declined in the industrial nations.
How did we end up in this worrisome, and worsening, situation? Several interacting processes are at fault. Analyses of them point to a number of actions that could help reverse the trend, if individuals, businesses and governments around the world can find the will to implement them.
One component of the solution is recognizing that bacteria are a ...

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to an antibiotic, the two main forces are the prevalence of resistance genes (which give rise to proteins that shield bacteria from an antibiotic's effects) and the extent of antibiotic use. If the collective bacterial flora in a community have no genes conferring resistance to a given antibiotic, the antibiotic will successfully eliminate infection caused by any of the bacterial species in the collection. On the other hand, if the flora possess resistance genes and the community uses the drug persistently, bacteria able to defy eradication by the compound will emerge and multiply.
Antibiotic-resistant pathogens are not more virulent than susceptible ones: the same numbers of resistant ...

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