Antibiotic or antimicrobial resistance transmission in bacteria

[Apurva Tathe]

As I have already discussed in my previous post about antibiotic concern read here and why I am taking this theme and educating everyone because it's not about one person being affected but it's all about community and global issue. Antibiotic resistance has been increasing in recent years and it all comes down to one thing that how we use antibiotics in animal husbandry, agriculture and in infectious diseases and now the time has come when we have very limited numbers of antibiotics being used when the deadly outbreak comes. So we have to secure the antibiotics for future use and how we are misusing antibiotics unnecessarily without even knowing of its harmful effects.

Diagrammatic representation of antimicrobial resistance passing in bacterial population (Illustration by Apurva Tathe)

Because we rosaceans heavily rely on antibiotics some with prescriptions and some with non-prescriptions. When doctor prescribes us antibiotics it has a dose value and time period that we need to complete in order to get rid of increased number of microbial population that inhabit our skin and become pathogenic because it triggers our inflammatory reaction and the main concern comes when we already have immunocompromised condition.

So, if there is a mutant strain of bacteria by chance in a large population because of changes in bacteria due to evolution over the course of time anyway it has a very fewer frequency but bacteria divides rapidly so if you introduce antibiotic, all the antibiotic susceptible bacteria die and mutant bacteria survive now what happens this AMR bacterial strain rapidly grows in population and becomes dominant (Figure).

There are two factors that introduce antibiotic resistance in bacteria either the dose value (taking the dose lower that the recommended value) and steady use of antibiotics when not needed further (time period exceeds). So dose value and time span matter a lot in how we use antibiotics.

Why I am considering this concern as a global health is without prescription and diagnostic tests, we ourselves rely on antibiotics and we spread this antimicrobial resistance to each other in human-human in communities, in hospitals and we even do not know this and the time comes when the outbreak of disease occurs and the first line of antibiotics and even second line of antibiotics fail to perform because of AMR in bacterial strains. Healthcare has now preserved some third line of antibiotic drugs to treat deadly infections in outbreaks.

Next I will take it further to explain how we spread this resistance.