A phenomenon that threatens to bring the hands of the clock back to a century ago when it was enough to infect a wound to die. It is mentioned in the Health insert on newsstands for free with Corriere on Thursday 24 March
We are publishing a preview of an article in the new Corriere Salute. You can read the full text on the issue at newsstands for free on Thursday 24 March or in Pdf on the Digital Edition of the «Corriere della Sera».
We have to change gears and try to stay one step ahead of the health emergency, without being forced to just run after it. No, we are not talking about the variants of Sars-CoV-2 and the Covid-19 pandemic, but about another problem on the horizon that promises to prove to be perhaps even more fearful, at least according to the estimates of the World Health Organization: the resistance of bacteria to known antibiotics run much more than scientific research and the development of new drugs. Translated, it means that more and more often today and even more in the near future antibiotics against germs “will make a fuss”, so treating infections will become more and more difficult. So difficult to the point that experts do not hesitate to predict a catastrophic situation by 2050, with 10 million victims every year in the world due to bacterial infections that were once highly treatable: today the deaths are over 700,000 a year, but the prospects they are dramatic.
During the last European Congress on Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases the specialists have wondered how many “final alarms” will still have to sound before the decision is made to tackle the “antibiotic crisis” and the problem of resistance; there does not seem to be much attention to the issue yet, as underlined by Francesco Scaglione, head of Clinical Pharmacology at the Niguarda Hospital in Milan and member of the Italian Society of Pharmacology: “The awareness of the problem of antibiotic resistance is there, but not much is being done to stem them. With the pandemic, then, a veil has fallen over everything. And to think that in the hospital many patients also died due to the simultaneous infection with multidrug-resistant bacteria ». These super-bacteria are the real nightmare: they do not respond to many of the known drugs and bring the clock back to a century ago, before the discovery of penicillin when it was enough to become infected with a fresh wound to die. The fear is that bacteria resistant to all antibiotics will develop (cases of almost total resistance have already been reported in Italy), but to have serious consequences it is enough for a germ to tolerate only one: in some infections the second or third lines of therapy cause irreversible adverse effects in the long term, in others there are no further treatment options and the possible complications are many, serious and even death.
The appearance of resistance, however, is an inevitable phenomenon, “Inherent in the very use of antibiotics, which kill sensitive germs but select microorganisms that randomly” save themselves “thanks to their characteristics, continuing to reproduce and thus producing new strains that do not respond to the drug initially used,” explains the pharmacologist. Developing resistance for the germ is like raising a line of defense in front of the enemy: the bacteria do this by preventing the antibiotic from entering thanks to changes in the cell membrane, making it ineffective thanks to tiny “pumps” that remove it as soon as it enters, creating enzymes that eliminate it or by finding ways to remedy the effects of the drug. The methods are many but all the resistances are written in the genes; the problem is that in the case of bacteria these are not only transferred to the offspring, as happens with human DNA which passes from parents to children, but also exchanged between microorganisms of different species.
You can continue reading the article on the Health Courier on newsstands for free on Thursday 24 March or in Pdf on the Digital Edition of Corriere della Sera.
March 22, 2022 (change March 22, 2022 | 18:42)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
#Corriere #Salute #antibiotic #crisis #resistant #bacteria #dangers