Researchers Find "Achilles Heel" of Drug Resistant Bacteria

Rambo Tribble writes Researchers in Britain are reporting that they have found a way to prevent bacteria from forming the "wall" that prevents antibiotics from attacking them. “It is a very significant breakthrough,” said Professor Changjiang Dong, from the University of East Anglia's (UAE) Norwich Medical School. “This is really important because drug-resistant bacteria is a global health problem. Many current antibiotics are becoming useless, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Many bacteria build up an outer defence which is important for their survival and drug resistance. We have found a way to stop that happening," he added. This research provides the platform for urgently-needed new generation drugs.

Comments

Re:Easier

[Rei]

Yeah, not everything is practical to develop resistance to. I mean, you're not going to have bacteria developing resistance to, say, a flame thrower ;) Even yeast, who make the stuff, get killed by alcohol when it's in too strong of a concentration. Don't get me wrong, there are alcohol-resistant bacteria. But we're not talking about a surface protein difference here or anything, we're talking "entirely spored off to stop the alcohol from dissolving the cell membrane". To resist alcohol the cell has to be so encased that it can't do anything else but wait for the alcohol to go away. And it has to be so encased at the time of exposure, not afterwards.

Alcohol-resistant species, most notably Clostridium, can be a problem for people who are sterilizing equipment. But these aren't species that developed alcohol resistance in response to doctors, these are naturally spore-forming species. Alcohol is such a brute force attack, a simple tweak to a cell just doesn't cut it. And alcohol has been a threat to microbes for a long, long time. And even if some species did develop an alcohol resistance and began to pose a threat, that would only have significance to people sterilizing equipment / surfaces. It wouldn't make a difference in terms of how to treat an infection once its in the body; it's not like you're not going to replace your blood with 90% isopropyl alcohol. ;)

Re:Easier

[k8to]

I'm a medical minimalist, but refusing to sterilize cuts is kind of stupid.

Your immune system doesn't need a significant exposure to antigens to trigger the normal hypothalamus reactions and induce immune-system learning and memory reactions. Meanwhile your immune system isn't guaranteed to win arbitrary scale battles and you don't really know what was on whatever cut you. It's not like really unfortunate bacteria are all that rare.

You should also realize that you get away with this because you live in a relatively low-bacteria environment, such as an arid or temperate one. By your logic you should move to the tropics because you'll get far more exposure to diseases. Only there refusing to sterelize cuts will lead to some really bad situations.