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by schneems 906 days ago
I extremely know nothing about this field. Would a naive approach would to have a coordinated “crop rotation” type tactic where all hospitals switched to a primary antibiotic every C years/months do anything?
1 comments

Empirically, many bacteria seem to be able to acquire resistance in a way that doesn't significantly impact their fitness, meaning they can basically get new resistances and keep old ones for almost arbitrarily long, so the crop rotation idea would fail massively.

https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/35/5/901/2680377

It has costs. Replication gets more expensive and slower, more error prone. Also bacteria exchanges resistance DNA among itself. Would be a cool vector to give them weekness.
Good to know, thanks for the explanation!