I’ve heard many times that we shouldn’t use antibiotics when not necessary because it could lead to bacteria developing resistance towards the drugs.
Couldn’t we simply counter this resistance with another drug?
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We run out of drugs before nature runs out of adaptations. Producing a single variant population of bacteria resistant to a single antibiotic is a very bad thing. “Training” them to become resistant to additional drugs is even worse.
Even more important than not using antibiotics when they aren’t necessary is continuing to use the *full course* of antibiotic treatment even when it seems unnecessary. Resistance isn’t just an all-or-nothing thing, and whichever bacteria are last to be destroyed are probably going to be more resistant than those which were the first to “respond” to the treatment. So by abandoning the course of treatment because enough bacteria have been eradicated the condition seems to be “cured”, there is a good likelihood that you’ve simply ‘cleared the field’ for whichever bacteria aren’t as quickly destroyed by that antibiotic, which can then spread and produce more “partially resistent” bacteria. Do this a couple times, and “natural selection” has evolved a strain that is nearly impervious.
We do not have an unlimited supply of “new” drugs. They take time and money to develop, we often have to find some new and unique source of antibacterial chemicals, often goes hand in hand with discovering new species of organisms.. there’s not an infinite supply of new organisms to be discovered and we’re killing them off with a global extinction event faster than they can be discovered.
There are issues with bacterial resistance that have been addressed by the other commenters, but there is another issue: companies are not developing new antibiotics. The fundamental issue is that any new antibiotics will be used sparingly and only when absolutely necessary. If they’re used too often, then bacteria will becomev resistant. This type of usage does not generate much income and the return on investment is almost never worth it.
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