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by tpainton
4621 days ago
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This person reminds me of a lot of people I went to medical school with. Very smart, and yet, not very realistic. He outlines a scenario that is endgame.. when in fact, we are seeing cyclical events. We saw the emergence of penicillin resistence in S. Aureas, then methicillin resistance. we moved to quinalones, and sulfa and we see resisance develop there.. OF COURSE it does. The antibiotics don't cause resistance.. Natural selection is the process going on here. There are random mutations that occur regardless of antibiotic exposure. We do see antibiotics cause resistance such as in inducible extended beta lactamase resistance.. (I have a patient currently with E coli resistant to everything but Colistin) but the overwhelming process..it's still good old fashion natural selection that Darwin made us all aware of. We really don't need to panic.. we just need to keep fighting the fight..because it won't ever end, unless we give up. Relax. When I hear people claim it was wanton use of antibiotics that caused all of this.. I wonder if they ever read a word about biologic evolution. Right now, there are organisms out there that are already resistant to antibiotics that haven't been developed yet. How can we blame humans for that? |
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> When I hear people claim it was wanton use of antibiotics that caused all of this.. I wonder if they ever read a word about biologic evolution
Natural selection describes the shift in characteristics of a population due to some environmental pressure which favours individuals with specific characteristics. How they acquire those characteristics is largely immaterial, be it through random mutation, sexual reproduction, viral transduction, etc.
So yes, natural selection is the process by which the resistant bacteria outcompete the vulnerable ones, and thus become the dominant population. But the reason that occurs in the first place is because of the environmental pressure induced by the antibiotic.
Or am I missing something here?