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In his book “Microcosm” Carl Zimmer says… ow!
There’s an old saying about death by a thousand papercuts. But what if it just took one?
That’s silly, right? I mean, even if this DID get infected, we’ve got antibiotics
to clean us up, it's easy as aspirin. But that all might be about to change.
New types of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are starting to take over, some able to beat
every drug we throw at them.
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We may be entering the post-antibiotic era, where something like this… could be the
end of me… all thanks to superbugs.
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News flash! Everything is covered in bacteria. That. Definitely that. Oh yeah, they’re
ALL over that. In fact, even YOU are full of bacteria. You might
as well be a sentient sack whose main job is to carry around 100 trillion or so microbes.
But hey, at least you’ve got purpose!
Usually they aren’t anything to worry about, because most bacteria aren’t dangerous,
heck, some are even our friends. Thanks for helping me digest breakfast, guys!!
But sometimes, we meet the bad guys in the form of bacterial infections. But hey, no
problem, we’ve got antibiotics! A few pills, you’re back to normal, right as rain, ship
shape!
Unfortunately that might soon be a thing of the past. We’ve got armies of superbugs
laughing tiny bacterial laughs in the face of every drug we throw at them. How did this
happen? To understand that, we need to look at where antibiotics come from.
There’s probably more bacterial mass on Earth than every other living thing combined.
In one spoonful of soil, there might be more than a billion microbes of more than 10,000
different species, and not just bacteria but also microscopic fungi, some cooperating,
others locked in chemical warfare.
It’s that chemical warfare that allowed Alexander Fleming to discover the very first
antibiotic, by accident. While cleaning off his lab bench, he saw a
petri dish had become contaminated with mold, and on it all the bacteria had died, as if
the mold was secreting poison. That fungus was a strain of Penicillium, and
the antibiotic that was isolated from it, penicillin.
Early on doctors couldn’t purify enough of it to actually use it in humans. One of
the first patients to receive penicillin was a British policeman who developed a deadly
infection after being scratched by a rose bush in his garden.
He had to have that penicillin filtered out of his urine to get the next dose, that’s
how valuable it was. He ended up dying anyway, but the age of antibiotics had begun!
Since then, these drugs have saved millions of lives, maybe even yours! Thanks to them,
we can treat pretty much every disease that used to kill you in Oregon Trail.
But now that’s changed. Each year, nearly two million people in the U.S. become infected
with bacteria resistant to at least one antibiotic, and 23,000 of those people die.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria are here. Well, not HERE, here.
I hope.
So how does resistance work? Sometimes random mutations result in anti-antibiotic
superpowers, but bacteria are also able to swap genes the way we swap baseball cards,
thanks to a process called gene transfer, either sweeping up antibiotic resistance in
the genetic remains of dead bacteria or exchanging it during a sort of bacterial makeout session
we call conjugation.
Bacteria like Staphylococcus have gained the ability to rebuild their cell wall faster
than one antibiotic breaks it down. Other bacteria have “learned” how to make pumps
that flush antibiotics out of the cell before they do their job.
Even in 1945 Fleming himself had already seen bacteria become resistant to penicillin. Dunno,
maybe we shoulda seen this coming? Antibiotics we DO have today have come mainly
from the environment, we’ve adopted the natural weapons that microbes use to wage
war on each other… but that also means they’ve had billions of years to develop resistance.
It seems like wherever nature has developed an antibiotic, it's also developed a way to
fight it. Resistance seems like an inevitable result of evolution.
Of course we are doing our part to help the superbugs succeed.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are prescribed antibiotics for viral infections.
Antibiotics DO NOT KILL VIRUSES. Let me just repeat that: Antibiotics DO NOT KILL VIRUSES.
And every time you don’t finish your full prescription, you run the risk of leaving
super-strong stragglers behind. Special antibacterial soaps? NO! Soap is antibacterial
by definition, I promise. Those special additives do nothing to make
us safer, and probably make the bugs stronger.
So what can we do? With bacteria figuring out how to beat antibiotics
within years of their release, most drug companies aren’t super-motivated to invest the billions
it takes to develop new ones. In 2004 there were only 5 antibiotics in development.
But hope is not lost. Besides not getting infected in the first place, we need to research
new ways to fight bad bacteria, using materials that are naturally antimicrobial, or phage
therapy, which uses viruses that infect bacteria to fight infections.
We might even be able to use good bacteria to fight the bad, like using fecal transplants
to fight Clostridium difficile infections in the digestive system.
Yep… fecal transplants. Who would have thought that poop could be used as medicine?
We also have to look at where our food comes from. Factory farms use 80% of all antibiotics,
where they can contaminate the environment and drive the evolution of superbugs.
And stop prescribing them for viral infections! It’s a cold, people!
We’re playing a game of coevolution, an arms race, with our health at stake. Drugs
and bacteria are like cheetahs and gazelles, the cheetah gets faster, and the gazelles
have to speed up to survive. Except I think maybe we’re the gazelles,
and I’m not sure how much faster we can run.
I mean, did we learn nothing from Jurassic Park?
Let’s face it: Bacteria were here first. They’ve got like a 3 billion year head start
on this whole life thing, so it’s not surprising that they’ve worked out some pretty good
survival skills.
In the past 100 years, next to clean water and vaccinations, it’s likely that nothing
has saved more lives than antibiotics, but we’ve got some work to do to avoid a future
where paper cuts and sore throats are deadly. But hey, we’re pretty good at surviving
too.
Stay curious… and… go wash your hands.
Hey, I'm Anna from "Gross Science"! Want to know more about fecal transplants? Head over
to my channel to find out why anyone would want to use poop as medicine.