Antibiotic resistance of pathogenic bacteria is not “a forecast for the future, since it is already manifesting itself right now in every region of the world and can negatively affect everyone, regardless of age, in every country.” This is a quote from the 2014 WHO global report. Since then, the situation has become even more tense, and today the best minds and colossal funds of the world’s main superpowers are thrown into the search for alternative ways to combat super microbes.
In truth, the emergence of super microbes was predicted back in 1928 by Alexander Fleming himself, a microbiologist who first described the action of the antibiotic penicillin. He managed to very simply formulate the very essence of bacterial resistance to antimicrobial drugs: “Someone is trying to heal just a cold, unnecessarily using penicillin for this, and thus teaches microbes to resist this medicine. And these, who have already learned to resist microbes, he will pass on to his best friend, who can get pneumonia and to whom, since the microbes have already learned to resist penicillin, this medicine will not help.
In the early 2000s, the world spoke with alarm about MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and Clostridium difficile, which were found to be responsible for the deaths of many people, as they say, out of the blue. Young athletes who did not return from the hospital after banal operations on ligaments – due to a fatal infection that developed during surgery, women who died due to indomitable diarrhea caused by Clostridia, which multiplied excessively in the intestines exposed after courses of antibiotics.
Modern super microbes kill up to 700,000 people a year. By 2050, this figure may increase to 10 million.
How antibiotic resistance develops
So, the problem is that infections become impossible to cure with standard antibacterial drugs (antibiotics) due to the bacteria being immune to the action of these drugs.
Resistance spreads in two main ways. First, it is the vertical transmission of stability. Bacteria that have learned to resist antibiotics pass on the genes they need to their children. Secondly, there is a horizontal transmission path (similar to sexual transmission), when bacteria exchange genes with each other. In the presence of antibiotic resistance genes, there is a natural turn in their favor. This is how it looks in the laboratory on a Petri dish.