Not to be all :im-vegan: but the continual decline of antibiotics efficacy is way more due to their routine use and misuse in animal agriculture. For every irresponsible doctor or human patient not completing a course, there is an entire farm using them en masse as attempted prophylaxis.
No idea if this specifically has anything to do with that, but every time declining effectiveness of antibiotics comes up I am compelled to mention this
It’s never that simple. Once you realise plasmids are a thing, bacterial genetics lineages stop being trees and are more like… three-dimensional cobwebs. It only takes adjacency of bacterial colonies for them to spread genetically. (overly simple e.g. respiratory bacterial infection in cow, cow is full of antibiotic resistant other bacteria, bacteria share plasmids, respiratory infection eventually spreads to humans, cow developed AB resistance is now in humans and can spread to most human bacterial species).
“Concept 34 Genes can be moved between species. Genes can be moved between species. Because of the universality of the genetic code, the polymerases of one organism can accurately transcribe a gene from another organism. For example, different species of bacteria obtain antibiotic resistance genes by exchanging small chromosomes called plasmids. In the early 1970s, researchers in California used this type of gene exchange to move a “recombinant” DNA molecule between two different species.”
For every irresponsible doctor or human patient not completing a course,
What’s crazy is that completing a course of bacteria or not isn’t even really known if it’s causing the arms race like at all. Like most science, we’re still trying to really pin things down well but there has been some amount of research suggesting it’s not nearly as big a deal as we thought.
