Bacterial Resistance
At twelve, I was a blossoming hypochondriac; that year, along with the kiss
of moist South Florida wind, the summer brought bacterial meningitis. On the
radio, newscasters reported the symptoms: fever, sore throat, stiff neck. Brain
damage and death were certain unless antibiotics were administered within seventy-two
hours.
One particularly hot day, I thought I felt stiffness in my neck. My parents
were out and my brother had a bottle of prescription pink stuff in the fridge.
I took one creamy, bitter spoonful, closing my eyes as I imagined the medicine
slipping into my cells and killing all the bad germs. Of course, I didn't
really have meningitis, but my mother scolded me when she got home: "Don't
you know that can make you sick?"
"It's medicine," I protested, "It won't hurt me." Better safe than sorry,
I thought sourly, and what does she know anyway?
As mothers are wont to be, she was right, however imperfectly she may have
explained it. Over the past century, once debilitating and deadly diseases
-- gonhorrea, syphilis, pneumonia, sepisis, cholera, tuberculosis, meningitis,
diahrrea, to name just a few -- have been controlled with antibiotics. But
these days, more and more scientists are worried that antibiotic resistant
bacteria are outpacing our best antibiotics. The drugs that once seemed like
miracles could someday -- and someday soon -- be useless. In the past few
decades, we've seen the return the old baddies, only this time bigger and
just as fierce. There is multi-drug resistant TB, methicillin resistant staph,
and penicillin and tetracycline resistant gonhorrea. About thirty percent
of cases of Streptococcus pneumoniae, a bacteria that causes meningitis, pneumonia
and ear infections, are resistant to penicillin.
Unfortunately, the adage
"what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" applies to bacteria as
well as people.
The social factors that lead to antibiotic misuse and subsequent bacterial
resistance are a little more difficult to pin down. Some point the finger
at pharmaceutical companies and marketing strategies, because more money is
to be made by prescribing more of the expensive broad spectrum antibiotics.
Some name inadequate education for both doctors and patients: patients expect
to be given antibiotics and are disgruntled if they aren't, while doctors
may assume that a broad spectrum antibiotic is better than a narrow one, when
that isn't the case. For instance, one study conducted found that as many
as 63% of vancomycin perscriptions were inappropriate. Another noted that
as few as 10% of adult sore throat cases warrented the antibiotics that were
perscribed.
Some worry that the use of antibiotics as growth boosters for livestock
is only making a breeding ground of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Outside of the developed world, the World
Health Organization worries that incomplete or inadequate use of antibiotics,
counterfeit antibiotics and poor distribution in general lead to resistant
bacteria, and those resistant bacteria will lead to further plagues.
So what's being done? A lot is being done to combat the problems of
bacterial resistance including the development
of new drugs and the development
of smarter policies.
