• Question: Will there come a time when diseases will be completely resistant to antibiotics and if so, is there anything which you can do to to find an alternative type of medicine which destroys bacteria?

    Asked by chickeny to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      It’s already happening, an increasing fraction of infections are like this. Google “antibiotic action” to find out more…

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      If it’s alive, we can kill it. I’m fairly sure that, however resistant bacteria become, we can always invent new types of chemicals to kill them. The only problem is that we need to keep up!

      Some of the antibiotics that we are using now have been used to decades, so it’s not that surprising that the bacteria have clocked on. Now we need to make a new set of antibacterial chemicals that work on these bacteria. More importantly, we need to stay on top of the game, so that there will never be a time when we have absolutely nothing that works. That’s definitely a scary thought!

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      At the moment, we are seeing a lot of resistance developing, because we don’t use antibiotics properly- we are essentially just showing them enough of it for them to work out how to become resistant to it.

      However, we are developing other ways of killing these things, and i am hoping that we will learn from our past mistakes to make sure that we use these new ‘antibiotics’ properly. I think that the meaning of the word ‘antibiotic’ might change as we find other ways of killing bacteria.

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      It’s also difficult to find new ways to kill bacteria which won’t also harm the people infected with them. It’s easy to kill bacteria – that’s why you can buy a bottle of kitchen spray for £1 which kills “99.9% of known germs”. What’s hard is finding something which only kills bacteria. There are lots of potential ways to do this though, for example there are some viruses which only infect bacteria and not humans or other animals and there is a lot of research into using these to treat bacterial diseases.

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