Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pella 1149 days ago
> The good news is that it's reversible.

While bacteria evolution can't be reversed, stopping antibiotics in animals can help lower the number of resistant bacteria. Good care practices can reduce the need for antibiotics.

2 comments

It actually can. Bacteria reproduce and die off rapidly. That means the rates of mutation are high. If there's no selective pressure from the antibiotics, then there's nothing reinforcing that resistance and it can mutate away in a few generations. This has actually been tested in laboratory settings: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6707769/
While bacteria evolution can't be reversed, the antibiotic resistance usually have a cost to maintain (the fitness cost¹) and without the evolutive pressure cause by the antibiotic, bacteria without those costly genes will eventually dominate.

1) https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro2319