How does antibiotic resistance work and why do incorrect/inconsistent dosages lead to it?
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If you got beat to death, you would not have the opportunity to do anything after the fact.
If you get beat within an inch of your life and recover, you’re probably going to take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Especially if it becomes a recurring event. Eventually, you’ll have developed the means to fend off your assailant.
So when you don’t take the right type, amount, duration of antibiotics to completely kill an infection, you are giving it the chance to learn and evolve.
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.
If someone is given an insufficient dose of antibiotics, or does not consistently take the full course of antibiotics, it can allow bacteria with some degree of resistance to the antibiotic to survive. Because the non-resistant bacteria have been killed, the resistant ones can breed without competing for food with other bacteria. Now the bacterial population is a bit resistant. Repeat this over and over and you start to have a bacterial population that is increasingly resistant to antibiotics.
Basically, improper use of antibiotics creates an environment that aggressively favors bacteria which are resistant.
If someone is given an insufficient dose of antibiotics, or does not consistently take the full course of antibiotics, it can allow bacteria with some degree of resistance to the antibiotic to survive. Because the non-resistant bacteria have been killed, the resistant ones can breed without competing for food with other bacteria. Now the bacterial population is a bit resistant. Repeat this over and over and you start to have a bacterial population that is increasingly resistant to antibiotics.
Basically, improper use of antibiotics creates an environment that aggressively favors bacteria which are resistant.
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