This week we will be discussing this new concept of the superbug. You know the type of superbug like the type that gives you a radioactive bite and lets you climb walls and shoot spidey webs out of your wrists (P.s. that would be frickin awesome). Unfortunately, no I am not talking about a bug that would give you super powers but more likely to kill you to be blunt.
The superbug that I am talking about is the microbe that will be introduced to the human population and we will have no treatment for it and we will be at the mercy of the superbug. By definition a superbug is a microbe that has developed resistance to multiple drugs that could once be used to treat its infection. The problem with the development of these superbugs is that we will have no modern medicine that can treat these microbes and can lead to many infection and deaths.
Bacterial infections and pathogens have been the major cause of human disease and death. For example, have you ever heard of something called the bubonic plague yeah it is a bacterial infection that killed millions. Antibiotics has protected our health and have allowed us to extend our longevity, but with increasing amount of antibiotic resistant microbes every day we are inching closer to the next superbug that could kill millions of the world’s population.
How antibiotics work is they tend to target specific cellular targets on microbes, and if they specific cellular target changes even slightly the drug is rendered useless which results in a antibiotic resistant microbe. A microbe can develop antibiotic resistance through two ways 1) spontaneous mutation that occurs during genetic replication and 2) horizontal gene transfer, in which antibiotic resistant genes are transferred to other microbes through plasmids or bacteriophages. The main reasons these microbes are becoming antibiotic resistant are the overuse of the antibiotics and the inappropriate use of them when they are not needed for use.
We use antibiotics in livestock production for the same reason we use antibiotics: disease treatment and disease prevention. Animals are infected in many of the same ways that humans are infected by bacterial pathogens. We use antibiotics on animals so that when we come in contact with these animals we do not transfer these disease to humans. Animals are considered antibiotic free, when you cannot detect antibiotics in the animal at the time of sale. It does not mean that antibiotics on the animal it only means that the use of antibiotics were stopped a couple of weeks before the sale of the livestock.
Vibrio Cholerae is a gram negative bacterium that leads to diarrhea and severe dehydration. Vibrio Cholerae normally only uses antibiotics in severe cases, but due to increase in antibiotic resistance more and more outbreaks have been occurring. In India, this study has been researching antibiotic resistant strains of Vibrio Cholerae because there have been 62 outbreaks of antibiotic resistant strains of Vibrio Cholerae. Follow this link to this study of increasing antibiotic resistance in Vibrio Cholerae in India.
Matty Ice signing off, peace!!!
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