About 440,000 new cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis emerge annually, causing around 150,000 deaths. Statistics such as these have led the Department of Health to state that antibiotic resistance poses one of the greatest threats to human health.
New scientific research has shown that bacteria can evolve resistance more quickly when stronger antibiotics are used. Researchers from the University of Exeter and Kiel University in Germany treated E. coli with different combinations of antibiotics. They found that the rate of evolution of antibiotic resistance speeds up when potent treatments are given because resistant bacterial cells flourish most during the most aggressive therapies. This happens because too potent a treatment eliminates the non-resistant cells, creating a lack of competition that allows resistant bacteria to multiply quickly. Those cells go on to create copies of resistance genes that help them rapidly reduce the effectiveness of the drugs. In tests, this effect could even cause E.coli to grow fastest in the most aggressive antibiotic treatments. “Designing new treatments to prevent antibiotic resistance is not easy, as this research shows, and governments may need to increase their funding for antibiotics research if scientists are to be able to keep pace with the rapid evolution of bacterial pathogens that cause disease,” said Professor Robert Beadmore, EPSRC Research Fellow from the University of Exeter.
Photo credit: WWW.PHIL.CDC.UK
