Antibiotic Resistance Is Growing

By Author: Steven Johnson
Total Articles: 494
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When it comes to medicine, it's always difficult to separate the real from the suggested. Unlike physics where you are dealing with absolutes like gravity, human biology is not quite so predictable. Everyone has slightly different genetic combinations and this can affect the way in which we react to different diseases. So, when doctors tell us things, they are really only talking about the majority. There are going to be exceptions. One of the more common statements from the health industry has been the threat of bacteria building up resistance to the standard antibiotics. When penicillin was first introduced, it was remarkably effective. Now it is less so because many of the bacteria that were vulnerable have now developed resistance. This was not a problem during the middle of the last century because our scientists were quick to identify new antibiotics. This kept us ahead of the developing resistance. Now that medical advances have slowed, the problem of resistant bacteria is becoming more real.

There are now some dangerous strains of resistant bacteria and scientists routinely blame two current practices. The first ...
... is the massive use of antibiotics in farming. Raising animals for food in often cramped and unhealthy conditions, is only possible with the use of drugs. Secondly, we humans have become too casual in our use of these drugs. In the last century, we used to wait until we were really ill before taking drugs. Now we take them even when we are healthy. The more the bacteria in our body are exposed to antibiotics, the more resistant they become.

Given this often repeated "truth", there's some new research which produces a rather surprising result. Many people have argued doctors have been too quick to prescribe the tetracycline antibiotics to treat acne. There are two concerns. First, people are actually healthy and although the bacteria causing the acne may be reduced, the other bacteria are learning how to survive exposure. Second, this learning process is encouraged because the doctors usually allow their healthy patients to take the antibiotics over a long period of time. Whereas antibiotics will usually be prescribed for no more than fourteen days unless the infection is particularly severe, some people take the tetracycline drugs for more than a month.

A team at the Pennsylvania School of Medicine has been testing a group of 83 participants to measure whether the colonies of Staphylococcus aureus that routinely appear in the human population, would be encouraged to develop resistance during an intake of tetracyclines over one to two months. Surprisingly, they seem not to have adapted to the antibiotic, a result that would encourage all those affected by acne to eat a lot of pills to control their acne. Unfortunately, this is too small a sample for the results to be significant, but it may prompt more research. After all, no matter how effective Accutane, it should remain the final solution after all other efforts have failed. Although the long-term use of the tetracyclines may produce yeast infections in women, they would be the safer option. Accutane has more dramatic effects and is inconvenient for women to use. So keep an eye on the research reports to see whether these results can be repeated in a larger sample of not less than one thousand participants.