14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers from the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, warn that short courses of antibiotics can leave behind normal gut bacteria with antibiotic resistance genes for as long as two years after the end of the treatment.
Before this new survey, health care professionals believed that the impact the antibiotics had on the normal gut flora was only for a short period of time, and any disorders that might be caused during the treatment, would disappear within weeks.
Dr Cecilia Jernberg, the leader of the review, explained that in the light of the results of her latest work, people were far too optimistic, AlphaGalileo reports.
There are several studies part of this Swedish review, which said that high levels of resistance genes can be found in the gut after only 7 days of antibiotic treatment, and that they stay in the gut for up to two years, even if the patient no longer takes antibiotics.
This supply increases the risk that the resistance genes surrender to pathogenic bacteria, helping them survive, and this can only mean that the side effects of antibiotic therapy are far more severe than was previously thought.
It's nothing new that antibiotics that are supposed to treat pathogenic bacteria also have a big impact on the normal microbial flora of the human gut, meaning that they can affect the composition of microbial populations – which can lead to new diseases, and allow the micro-organisms resistant to the antibiotic, to develop even further.
Dr Jernberg said that the consequences of this could be life-threatening, because “the long-term presence of resistance genes in human gut bacteria dramatically increases the probability of them being transferred to and exploited by harmful bacteria that pass through the gut.
“This could reduce the success of future antibiotic treatments and potentially lead to new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
What she suggests in her review, is that antibiotics must be used with caution, because there is nothing new about antibiotic resistance, and “there is a growing battle with multi-drug resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria.
“The development of new antibiotics is slow and so we must use the effective drugs we have left with care.
“This new information about the long-term impacts of antibiotics is of great importance to allow rational antibiotic administration guidelines to be put in place,” she concluded.
The findings will appear in the latest issue of Microbiology, November 3rd.