14 DAY TRIAL // Bacteria are the longest living organisms on Earth, estimated to have appeared around 3 billion years ago, long before anything else inhabited the surface or the oceans. They have remarkable adaptation skills, and are in fact the only group of living things that can survive virtually anywhere, from hydrothermal vents and volcanoes, to the bottom of gold mines, feeding off the natural decay of uranium, to several miles under the ice sheets of Antarctica and the Arctic. Ever since humans first appeared, we have been plagued and saved by them, and it would now appear that they are winning the evolutionary battle, unless we do something about it, the BBC News reports.
Inside our guts, millions over millions of bacteria of the “good” variety help us sustain ourselves throughout our lives. Over the course of evolution, we became so closely intertwined with them that physicians say removing all bacteria from our bodies would kill us. This symbiotic relationship that we live in can, however, at any moment, be turned around on its head, if outside intruders penetrate our immune system. From plague to cholera, to HIV, flesh-eating bacteria, infections of all varieties, the swine flu and tuberculosis, microorganisms including microbes, bacteria, viruses and fungi have managed to capture our attention since the earliest times.
While, in the Dark Ages, the human race had nothing at its disposal to try and fight infections, and often brought infections down on themselves through poor hygiene and health behaviors, the same does not hold true today, when it appears that even more diseases and infections are caused by bacteria than ever before. And this happens in spite of the fact that we now have the means to understand them, decipher their genetic code – as in we are not entirely defenseless. However, we seem to be hurting ourselves, as doctors over-prescribe medication to treat the simplest conditions, thus giving birth to new, super-strains of bacteria that are also antibiotics-resistant.
“Sensible prescribing is part of the answer but we also need new antibiotics – it's not one of the most attractive areas for pharmaceutical companies as people don't take them for very long, unlike treatments for heart disease or cancer. It is a war of attrition. There have been points where we have been advancing, and points when we have had to beat a retreat. If we were having this conversation 20 years ago for instance we would be celebrating the vaccine for bacterial meningitis. Really it is vaccines – rather than antibiotics – which hold the key to the big victories,” says Health Protection Agency infections expert Dr. David Livermore.
It will be a long time until we manage to defeat the microorganisms, and it's a distinct possibility that we never will. There will always be random mutations to account for, which could transform seemingly harmless strains into potent killers, as it happened at the beginning of the 20th century with the swine flu pandemic, which killed millions. However, the show must go on, and research efforts into finding ways of staying alive need to continue.