How does antibiotic resistance work and why do incorrect/inconsistent dosages lead to it?
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Imagine I am an evil scientist on a Saturday morning cartoon show, and I’ve chosen to use an evil insect swarm to rob the local bank, because, again, Saturday morning cartoon show. Unfortunately for my evil plans, the heroes always show up with their giant robot that shoots fire and defeat my insect swarm while also somehow not destroying the city. I want to beat them, so I set out to create an insect swarm that is heat-resistant.
I might take a lot of insects and put them in a very hot place until only a few are still alive. These survivors will be the ones most tolerant to heat. I then breed these survivors with each other and expose their children to heat until only a few remain. These ones are even MORE heat-resilient. I repeat this process a few hundred times, being very careful not to kill them all at any given step, because then I’d have to start over. Eventually I have insects that aren’t stopped by the heroic fire robot anymore and I succeed in my evil plan to rob the bank. Looks like things are really *heating up* for the heroes!
This is basically the same way antibiotic resistance works for bacteria. If you don’t take enough antibiotics for long enough, you run the risk of not killing all the bacteria. The ones that survive will of course be the ones most genetically resistant to your antibiotic type, and they will then divide and create a large, antibiotic-resistant infection that we can’t deal with easily. If those bacteria are then able to infect others, that can be a real problem – while we have a few different types of antibiotics, we *only* have a few different types of antibiotics, and when they don’t work, the backup treatments range can have nasty side effects, or in some cases, might not even exist. Do you think humanity can survive an epidemic of antibiotic resistant bacteria? Find out on next week’s show.
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