Antibiotics are a staple of modern medicine and save millions of lives every year. But they are also harming the normal bacterial system our health relies on.
"Those random extension events, every now and again, will hit a critical bug," says Dantas."This is the weird evolutionary experiment we're running on ourselves every time we take an antibiotic."
The other consequence of long-term antibiotic use is the risk of resistance. When a population of bacteria is exposed to an antibiotic, those that lack the genes for antibiotic resistance tend to die off. But ones which do have them – either genes they have picked up from their environment, or mutations that have arisen spontaneously – will survive. In this way, the drugs actively select for bugs that are antibiotic-resistant.
And this process isn't confined to our guts, says Craig MacLean, professor of evolution and microbiology at the University of Oxford."Resistant bacteria can migrate from the gut to other areas, so what happens in the gut has an impact on the rest of our body," he says. The harmful and life-saving impact of antibiotics is one of the biggest conundrums troubling scientists around the world. While there is no one solution, there are approaches which could mitigate the harmful effects of antibiotics on our health.
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