For many years, antibiotics have been effectively used to treat bacterial diseas
ID: 15991 • Letter: F
Question
For many years, antibiotics have been effectively used to treat bacterial disease; and pesticides have been used to protect our agricultural crops from many kinds of pests, including insects, worms (nematodes), fungi, or agricultural weeds, for example.A growing concern for treating bacterial diseases or pest outbreaks is the evolution of antibiotic or pesticide resistance by bacterial or pest populations. Resistance means that a particular antibiotic is no longer effective in treating a disease, or that a particular pesticide will no longer prevent crop damage. This resistance can be viewed as evolution of a new trait at the population level, which is resistance to an antibiotic or to a pesticide. In this assignment, you will explore specific examples of antibiotic or pesticide resistance.
Assignment details:
After reading materials about evolution and about antibiotic and pesticide resistance in the text, the Course Materials, the AIU Online Library and / or the Internet, answer the following.
Select and describe one example of antibiotic resistance or pesticide resistance. Be specific in your choice.
Describe the background for your choice of resistance. Include details about the disease or pest and the established control strategies. How have we used antibiotics (to treat a particular disease), or pesticides (to protect from a pest); and how has this changed?
Explain how the resistant trait evolved based on principles of natural selection and evolution of a trait at the population level.
For your specific example, what are the consequences of resistance in terms of human health or crop loss / damage?
What steps can be taken to prevent or slow down the evolution of antibiotic or pesticide resistance? Do you think we will succeed in doing so? Why or why not?
Explanation / Answer
I'll choose antibiotic resistance. The specific example being the SA/MRSA/V-MRSA situation. The treatment of staph infections has led to increases in resistance to methicillin resistance strains followed by methicillin and vancomyosin resistant strains. By selecting against those strains that are not resistant, the resistant strains thrive and are selected for. V-MRSA is now a largely untreatable superbug and is somewhat a death sentence among nosocomial diseases. Essentially to limit the spread, vancomyosin is only delivered by medical professionals to prevent patients from not completing the entire course of treatment. A popular method of treatment to prevent resistance is to use drug cocktails, where you combine drugs limiting the chances of resistance to all drugs at the same time. Evolution is a given and drug treatment takes as much as ten years to develop and many millions of dollars, so the outlook for ultimately preventing antibiotic resistance in every aspect will not be achieved in this lifetime.
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