Antibiotics and bacterial resistance. A few elements of genetic basis for this relationship

Abstract

In the preantibiotic era, many people died of bacterial infections caused by such pathogens as Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Antibiotics have reduced the mortality from infectious diseases but not the prevalence of these diseases. It was not long after the clinical introduction of the first antibiotics in the 1950s that the first reports of bacterial resistance began to appear. Use, and often abuse or misuse, of antimicrobial agents has encouraged the evolution of bacteria toward resistance, resulting often in therapeutic failure. In the beginning, new antibiotics have always appeared in plenty of time to provide new cures for diseases caused by resistant bacterial pathogens. Also, some clinically important groups of bacteria showed no signs of major increases in resistance. For example, S. pneumoniae strains remained susceptible to penicillin long after other bacteria had become resistant to it. Recent developments of bacteria resistance to antibiotics are indeed disquieting.