November 18, 2010 – A single treatment with antibiotics could cause the emergence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics that would survive in the body for several months, sometimes a few years, according to Swedish researchers who analyzed recent scientific data on the subject.
Contrary to popular belief, antibiotics do not only have short-lived effects in the body. Researchers have reported various clinical cases which have made it possible to observe the presence, in a patient, of bacteria carrying genes for resistance to various antibiotics, sometimes from 2 years to 4 years after the end of an antibiotic treatment.
The long-term persistence of these genes increases the likelihood of transmission of antibiotic resistance to various bacteria that pass regularly, normally harmlessly, through the digestive tract. This would lead to a risk of markedly weakening the effectiveness of several antibiotics against transforming bacteria, the researchers explain.
They stress that the creation of new, more “efficient” antibiotics takes time and that existing ones should therefore be used with more caution. “It is important that we quickly put in place medical protocols for the rational administration of antibiotics,” they argue.
The effects of antibiotic resistance
Asked to comment on the study, pharmacist Jean-Yves Dionne says that “finally, these results confirm what we suspected for a long time: bacterial resistance is a much more serious problem than previously considered”.
Antibiotic resistance can cause 2 main problems, he explains:
1- In an individual, the infection may reappear either immediately or after several months. This is the case, for example, in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) who have recurrent infections and who eventually become resistant.
2- In the general population, a person can recover from their infection, but still carry a resistant mutation which does not develop in them, but which can be transmitted to another weakened person and therefore cause a potential “epidemic” .
Pierre Lefrançois – PasseportSanté.net
1. Jernberg C, Löfmark S, Edlund C et al. Long-term impacts of antibiotic exposure on the human intestinal microbiota. Microbiology. 2010 Nov; 156 (Pt 11): 3216-23.
