Bacteria vs anti-biotics?
I have been reading a riveting book “Plague Time” by Paul W Ewald. Did you know that some bacteria can change and produce a new generation in 20 minutes? That’s changed enough for the anti-biotic you are currently taking to be less effective. This is one reason why anti-biotics in their current state are not winning the medical world’s war on bacteria. He goes on to say that all pathogens, whether bacteria, viruses, fungi or any other agent that causes disease in us humans, have the ability to ramp up their virulence depending on the speed at which they can infect another host. If the transit time is slow their virulence will be low (they don’t want to kill us off before they can move onto another host) but if they can move quickly they’ll be more virulent. And individual pathogens can alter dependent on the conditions they find themselves in. How clever is that? So Prof Ewald’s theory is that we need to take a new look at how we deal with these pathogens and stop trying to annihilate them with anti-biotics and instead treat them with something that will encourage them to ramp their virulence down to zero in which case we can all live happily every after!
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