Drug resistance antibiotic resistant pathogens

Invent and learn to manufacture effective antiviral agents and antibiotics to fight all serious diseases, including those caused by drug-resistant pathogens. 

One of the major criticisms of FDA s scientific basis for wanting to restrict the use of antibiotics in animal feeds has been that it has not provided any specific instances of human illness due to drug-resistant pathogens that resulted from the subtherapeutic feeding of antibiotics to animals. However, individual events in the complicated sequence have been documented. Another report (12) by Dr. Scott Holmberg and others at CDC which appeared in the September 6, 1984, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine purportedly linked, for the first time, the use of subtherapeutic antibiotics in livestock feed to the development of serious drug resistant infections in humans. 

Use of penicillin and the tetracyclines also causes selection for pathogenicity factors, that is, disease-causing factors. These factors and drug resistance have been shown to be linked on the same plasmid. Pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance can therefore be transferred simultaneously to other organisms. 

R-plasmids can be transferred from normally nonpathogenic E. coli to certain pathogenic strains of bacteria with which they may come in contact in man or animals. Since R-plasmids carry drug resistance, this transfer can result in the creation of pathogenic strains of bacteria which are resistant to antibiotic therapy. 

Continued unrestricted subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed increases the pool of drug-resistant bacteria in our environment. Moreover, the prospect of pathogens becoming drug resistant is, as FDA believes, a real threat to human health. 

A constantly increasing problem in antibiotic treatment is the development of resistant pathogens that no longer respond to the drugs available. The illustration shows a few of the therapeutically important antibiotics and their sites of action in the bacterial metabolism. 

The emergence of microbial antibiotic drug resistance was speeded by the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in humans and livestock. Exposure to very low concentrations of antibiotic in meat or milk may have provided a path whereby human pathogens could eventually evolve high-level antibiotic drug resistance. Recently some strains of enterococcus and tuberculosis have developed resistance to all known antibiotic drugs. Inappropriate use of antibiotics is very common, and it accelerates the development of resistance in pathogens. 

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