Superbugs, what makes them so ‘super’?
Superbugs, a doctors nightmare, disease causing pathogens that are resilient to common forms of treatment. With more and more pathogens evolving into ‘superbugs’ every year this does not seem like a problem that is going away anytime soon.
So how do superbugs come about, how does a bug become ‘super’?
First we should cover some background. In 1929 an English man named Alexander Fleming discovered one of the most famous therapeutic drugs of our time. Penicillin.
Fleming stumbled upon penicillin by observing how a piece of mould on one of his discarded petri dishes had a formed an aurora around it free from bacteria as if it had some protective barrier. It was here he discovered that this ‘mould juice’ had antibiotic properties, proving deleterious for many different species of bacteria.
In fact, he wasn’t actually the first to notice the antibacterial properties of mould, ancient Egyptians used to pack mouldy bread into wounds because it was known to reduce the chance of infection.
Shortly after Flemings discovery, researchers began to learn to synthesise penicillin and during the war it was used on the battlefield as a so called miracle drug, preventing many wounded soldiers dying from infected wounds.
As many more antibacterial drugs have been created, penicillin has been placed in the broad spectrum class of antibiotics and it and variants of the drug are still commonly used. Often as a preoperative antibiotic used to prevent post surgical infections as well as in the treatment of common and sometimes deadly diseases like pneumonia and meningitis.
So, we have discussed a lot about penicillin, but where do these superbugs fit in.
When you visit your doctor and present with symptoms of a bacterial infection, doctors will often prescribe you with a broad spectrum antibiotic like a type of penicillin. This provides and easy, effective and fast treatment, for many diseases. What the doctor will also tell you is that you must complete a ‘course of treatment’ whereby you continue to take the drug after you recover. This is to ensure that nearly all of the bacteria is dead, yet people don’t always listen to their doctors.
By not taking a full course and leaving some of the bacteria causing the infection alive, they can slowly adapt to surviving in the lower concentrations of antibiotic. Due to the high reproductive rate of bacteria, many generations occur over the space of a day hence, they can evolve over a short time period. Over time these bacteria become more and more adapted to surviving in the presence of the antibiotic until they become resistant. It is these bacteria that are added to the category of superbugs.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria are the most prevalent forms of superbugs, but there are countless other fungi and viruses that are members of this category of diseases. All of them much like the infamous influenza virus, adapting and changing month on month evading new treatments faster than they are discovered.
Thus, with the rise of more and more superbugs previously curable diseases are becoming more deadly year on year.
So, what are health professionals doing now to combat the rise in superbugs?
Firstly we are reducing our usage of antibiotics. Instead of treating them like a silver bullet for all bacterial infections, we are attempting to only use them if absolutely necessary, where there is no other therapeutic method available. Secondly, professionals prescribe them to be used for the shortest possible treatment plan. A plan that is long enough to disable pathogens effectively whilst short enough not to expose them to the therapeutic drug for long enough that their populations can adapt.
What can we do as a society?
What we shouldn’t do is panic. Superbugs aren’t a mystical organism created in a laboratory to kill us all. They have arisen from natural selection and as the populations of pathogens adapt we must learn to adapt too.
We must learn to take a proactive approach to combating disease, rather than the reactive one we have used for centuries. And the centre point for this is vaccinations.
For example, there are strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for the respiratory disease tuberculosis, that are becoming resistant to the antibiotics used in its treatment. As such, a preventative approach is being taken, by continuing to vaccinate more of the population against tuberculosis in an effort to eliminate tuberculosis by 2050, we are reducing our dependancy on antibiotics as a treatment and hence reducing their total usage world wide.
So, let’s begin to take our health into our own hands, let’s be on the front foot. Let’s get vaccinated, isolate when sick and become proactive rather than remaining reactive. And maybe, just maybe these superbugs might not seem so super after all.
