>Health officials said the case in Pennsylvania, by itself, is not cause for panic. The strain found in the woman is treatable with some other antibiotics.
So the last resort doesn't work, but other stuff works. It's totally reasonable to assume that if bacteria becomes resistant to more common antibiotics, that some other kind of antibiotic could do the trick.
Though I guess it would be nicer to have some sort of "proof" that the bacteria _does_ get weaker to stuff it's less exposed to.
Actually, side note but wouldn't mass feeding of antibiotics for certain kinds of bacteria let us completely wipe it out, a la smallpox?
-- Viruses can't reproduce outside their host. They have a limited lifetime in the environment before they degrade.
-- Immunity lasts a long time, even a lifetime.
-- So, if you successfully immunize everyone in the population against a virus (like smallpox), and keep doing it for a few years, then eventually that virus will die out
This is not true for bacteria. Many bacteria can live in the wild, and in fact only opportunistically infect humans. Also, antibiotics are only effective while you are taking them, and many of them have negative consequences if taken for long times in therapeutic doses (stomach upset, light sensitivity, yeast infections, just to name a few). Next, 60% to 90% of a dose of penicillin is excreted into the urine fully intact, so our sewers, which are teeming with bacteria, would also be flooded with sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics. Finally, bacteria can exchange DNA with each other, even inter-species, so if we train the sewer germs to survive an antibiotic dose, then they can transfer that capability to other more virulent bacteria that can infect humans. This is, in fact, probably the mechanism for formation of some of these multi-drug resistant strains.
>Health officials said the case in Pennsylvania, by itself, is not cause for panic. The strain found in the woman is treatable with some other antibiotics.
So the last resort doesn't work, but other stuff works. It's totally reasonable to assume that if bacteria becomes resistant to more common antibiotics, that some other kind of antibiotic could do the trick.
Though I guess it would be nicer to have some sort of "proof" that the bacteria _does_ get weaker to stuff it's less exposed to.
Actually, side note but wouldn't mass feeding of antibiotics for certain kinds of bacteria let us completely wipe it out, a la smallpox?