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Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Persistent Bacteria Go Down
Doctors have discovered that adding sugar to antibiotics increases their ability to knock out persistent staph infections (abstract). Certain types of bacteria called persisters shut down their metabolic processes when exposed to antibiotics. Adding sugar keeps the bacteria feeding, making them more susceptible to drugs. From the article: "Adding such a simple and widely available compound to existing antibiotics enhances their effectiveness against persisters, and fast. One test showed that a sugared up antibiotic could eliminate 99.9 percent of persisters in two hours, while a regular antibiotic did nothing. Doctors believe that this discovery will help treat urinary tract infections, staph infections, and strep throat, but its most life-saving application may be against the age-old disease tuberculosis. This infection of the lungs kills many people, and is hard to fight off. A little sugar could help save a lot of lives."
We use honey because it's antibiotic(kills bacteria) and it's contains sugar that just kill everything by osmotic pressure.
The part about bacteria keeping their metabolism going untill they die if you add sugar to the antibiotic is new.
High blood sugar does not necessarily mean you ate a lot of sugar, in fact, the summary sounds like they are talking about white sugar. White sugar is far from the only sugar out there. The basic rule of thumb is: if the ingredient ends with "ose", it's a sugar (sucrose, dextrose, lactose, fructose, etc). Btw, I come from a family with a long history of Diabetes (both type 1 and 2).
Is there a reason why it would remain hard for the bacteria to stay dormant in the presence of antibiotics as long as there is sugar around?
Yes. Bacteria are simple. Feed in presence of food, dormant in absence of food is simple behaviour that can be trivially implemented using some chemical signals. Feed in presence of food and absence of antibiotic, dormant in presence of antibiotic is harder. You have to process two signals, do some weighting, and then select the correct behaviour.
You also need to think about the intermediate steps. A bacterium on the way to evolving this behaviour would almost certainly not get it right first time. If it doesn't feed in the presence of sugar and the presence of non-fatal doses of antibiotics (or the absence of antibiotics), then it will be selected against in favour of ones that do. If it does feed in the presence of antibiotics, then it will die.
Remember, evolution is only good at selecting local maxima, not global maxima, and the path to this involves jumping from one local maximum to another. If someone were intelligently designing bacteria, then it would be a lot easier...
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The glucose is the metabolite and is used alongside an aminoglycoside antibiotic. It is aminoglycoside dependent because adding the sugar only works with aminoglycoside antibiotics: mannitol (the sugar) was tested with gentamicin (an aminoglycoside antibiotic), ofloxacin (a quinolone antibiotic) and ampicillin (a beta-lactam, specifically a penicillin antibiotic) and the only one which showed an improved response was the mannitol + gentamicin combination.
Glucose, mannitol and fructose then showed the greatest response with gentamicin (ribose, glycerol etc were much lower).
Have you read the article?