The Antibiotic Paradox by Dr. Stuart Levy

In gonorrhea, "Since infections resistant to penicillin and tetracycline became very common, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the treatment of newly developed antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin for treatment, regarding infectious diseases Recently "Some Staphylococcus aureus are causing epidemics in hospitals and now cause staphylococcal infections resistant to vancomycin, one of the most potent antibiotics "(3). According to the National Institute of Allergy Research website website, 5 to 10% of hospitalized patients are infected.

The controversy over the use of antibiotics on the farm shows a complex role they describe as "social drugs" in his book "Antibiotic Paradox". Antibiotic resistance begins with random or accidental metastasis of genes, but in the absence of selective pressure for exposure to antibiotics, mutants do not occupy major positions in the bacterial population. Through the abuse and overuse of antibiotics, human society has brought the possibility of a pandemic to rare events. In 1997, Levy wrote, "Everyone uses it", both humans and animals, "both contribute to the total of social antibiotic exposure, in a wider sense, resistance is ecological" in 1997 It is.

Traditional broad spectrum antibiotics can cause serious incidental damage. "Not only do antibiotics select the resistance of the bacteria you are trying to treat, but also serious damage to the environment's bacteria," Stuart Levy said. "I do not know how big this domino effect is, in the previous environment bacteria that could potentially be secondary participants now have a changing environment that makes it a major player" , It is ironic that antibiotics promote serious infection. One of the most deadly cases is Clostridium difficile, a natural intestinal resident whose strong spores grow after antibiotic treatment. There is no ordinary microbial ecosystem to control it, Difficile can cause symptoms from mild diarrhea to life-threatening colitis, currently 14,000 people die in the United States and annual medical costs are at least 1 billion dollars.

In 1976, Tufts University's Stuart Levy was the only prospective study to investigate whether the use of small amounts of antibiotics in livestock would potentially infect humans. His team began giving tetracyclines to some chickens on a small farm in Sherborne, Massachusetts, who had never used antibiotics for animals before. Within a week, tetracycline resistance occurred in chicken intestinal bacteria, after which untreated chickens appeared in adjacent pens - a few months later they appeared in the farm household intestinal flora. More shockingly, over time, tetracycline-resistant bacteria also develop resistance to other unrelated antibiotics that have never been exposed. This finding is due to the aggregation of the resistance gene on the mobility plasmid as described in Japan and then spreads to other bacterial species. The farm functions as a multidrug resistant incubator