Make sure you’re sitting down before reading this blog post because this is some scary and shocking stuff… and it’s all our faults! Antibiotic resistance is something that you may have heard about before, but it is becoming more relevant as it increases and becomes a more pertinent issue. A superbug is a bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics. The number of superbugs is growing largely due to the wrongful use of antibiotics. There are new organisms that are becoming resistant as seen by the CDC’s constantly evolving list of “urgent threats, serious threats, concerning threats, and watch list,” of different microorganisms that are superbugs or could become superbugs.
If we lost the ability to use antibiotics, well, we’re probably dead. As Professor Cramer puts it, antibiotics are “miracle drugs.” Doctors, patients, farmers, and others have taken advantage of their power and, as a result, we are in a big mess. Without them, there are very little treatment options and the duration/ consequences of previously simple infections could kill us. The emergence of antibiotic resistance is a result of many different factors, the two largest being the wrongful prescription/ use of antibiotics and agricultural use of antibiotics. If you hear anything from this blog post, DO NOT use antibiotics for a common cold or viral infection!!!! When this happens, it increases the possibility that stronger and mutant bacteria survive and are able to pass on their resistance genes to other bacteria and humans.
Bacteria are also gaining resistance due to commercial farming. Antibiotics are used in the agriculture industry to increase the weight and health of animals (aka to get more money.) This does not only affect animals! It has astounding affects on humans because, even if a food is stated to be “antibiotic-free” on the package, this only means that antibiotics were not found in its system at the time of sale. This implicates that the antibiotics could have been used for the animals entire lifespan, yet they weren’t given to them towards the end so that it would be “antibiotic-free” and more preferable at the grocery store. When humans consume these foods, they are also consuming the trace amounts of antibiotics in the meat, eggs, etc. Even scarier, crops are also affected by the antibiotics given to livestock because the manure (which contains antibiotics from the feces) is used to grow them.
Shigella sonnei is an example of an antibiotic resistant bacteria. This disease causes fever, dysentery, vomiting, etc. Through scientific studies, it has been confirmed that Shigella can become resistant through innate, acquired, or adaptive mechanisms. More specifically, it utilizes efflux pumps to remove the antibiotics as well as changes the target receptors so the antibiotics cannot bind. The antibiotics for S.sonnei are extremely important because they prevent death along with the prevalence of the illness.
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