What is antibiotic resistance?

by Simran Jayasinghe

Maybe it was a case of strep throat, an ear infection, or pneumonia that prompted you to take a trip to your doctor’s office, expecting to be prescribed a quick course of antibiotics and be sent on your way. We have come to think of antibiotics as as a quick, easy fix for a wide range of problems, but their efficacy may be changing due to something called antibiotic resistance.

Let’s briefly go over how antibiotics work. Antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections. They are not effective against viral infections, and therefore cannot be used to treat a cold, the flu, COVID-19, or any other disease caused by a virus. There are a few different ways that antibiotics work. Some antibiotics prevent the bacterial cell from making a specific molecule that provides structure and strength to its cell wall, weakening the cell wall to the point where the bacterial cell cannot survive in the human body. Some antibiotics stop a bacterial cell from making proteins, therefore blocking important functions and making it unable to multiply in the human body. Different types of antibiotics work in different ways, but they all end up making the bacterial cells unable to survive in the human body, killing them. Since their discovery, antibiotics have been used to fight many different bacterial infections. But like all living things, bacteria adapt to survive, and we have started to see more cases of bacteria that have adapted to be resistant to certain antibiotics.

There are a few different ways that bacteria can develop antibiotic resistance. One is taking antibiotics too often. If someone has taken antibiotics to fight against a certain type of bacterial infection many times, the bacteria will become more and more resistant to the antibiotic. Bacteria can also acquire antibiotic resistance when antibiotics are used incorrectly. If someone takes antibiotics to try and treat a viral infection, the antibiotics will target bacteria in your body that weren’t causing an infection, causing this bacteria to adapt and gain antibiotic resistance to protect itself. If this bacteria becomes a problem in the future, the type of antibiotics that targeted it before may not be effective.

This can be a problem in healthcare, as patients with antibiotic-resistant infections may need stronger antibiotics or different types of antibiotics. In some cases, no antibiotic will work on a certain bacterial infection. These drug-resistant bacterial infections can be dangerous and even deadly. It is important that healthcare providers and individuals take steps to reduce the risk of acquiring antibiotic-resistant infections. For healthcare providers, these steps include being careful of how often antibiotics are prescribed, and evaluating if antibiotics are really necessary, even when patients ask for them. For individuals, this means taking antibiotics as prescribed; not saving prescribed antibiotics for later use, taking antibiotics prescribed for someone else, or taking antibiotics for viral infections. This can also mean checking if antibiotics are necessary when given a prescription by your healthcare provider.

Did you learn something new about antibiotics/antibiotic resistance? Let us know in the comments!


Sources:
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LiveScience, https://www.livescience.com/44201-how-do-antibiotics-work.html
CDC (Centers for Disease Control), https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/about.html