Knowing nothing about this area... isn't this a bad idea because board use would increase the risk of resistance appearing and would mean those bacteria resistant to this would be extremely resistant to most other treatments aw well (given this drug has multiple modes of attack)?
It's basically the same reason we don't fear bacteria to develop resistance to boiling or alcohol disinfectant.
A fast Google search gives this paper: " Relatively Alcohol-Resistant Mycobacteria Are Emerging Pathogens in Patients Receiving Acupuncture Treatment" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC140401/
There are some archeas (and a few bacterias) that support boiling temperature, but IIRC they don't like meatware because it's too cold for them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile
Mycobacterium Abscessus, in particular is great at surviving in low-carbon environments (with very little food), and its protective shell and clustering formation protects it from low levels of chlorine. I cultured shower heads, sink faucets, and soda fountains in order to find them. Nasty stuff.
My thoughts exactly. Try using it in large scale animal farms for a couple decades and I'm betting something will become resistant.
EDIT further down people are making the same point (I think)
It's an issue of selection pressures. If they live in a competitive environment, which includes competing against each other, then the most "fit" ones win by out reproducing the competition. Mutations that made them more fit in an environment rife with antibiotic X may be mostly harmless in the absence of X, or might consume resources that can ill be afforded. See e.g. this subthread for more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8853232
edit: philwelch argues in a comment in this thread that this exact thing happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8853769
The idea is that drug resistance comes with a metabolic cost. We're making them do something to survive that we didn't before, and it's going to come at a cost.
If we think of them like cars--armoured ones are extremely rare. However, if we started randomly shooting at cars, and did so for a protracted period, we would eventually see them become more common. The fact they're slower, don't turn as well, and use more fuel is now negligible because of the excessive benefit of it's contents not being shredded.
If the implementation of this new antibiotic came with a moratorium on the prescription of penicillin, then we would be targeting the population as a whole with an RPG. It doesn't matter if you're armoured against bullets anymore. Both the normal and the resistant will be put under the identical survival pressures, which should mean it is more effective against the resistant strains as these won't be as fast to replicate.
The problem from what I understand is that tackling antibiotic resistant drugs with drugs designed for antibiotic bacteria, just makes super bugs.
Essentially if we cleared the roads of regular cars and left ourselves with armoured cars, and then start firing RPGs at them, we'll end up with vehicles resistant to those. We will end up with APC's on the road.
If we implemented a moratorium on penicillin strain antibiotics, we could potentially reverse the current epidemic of multi-drug resistant strains. It would be like starting anew - assuming there's no genes that are equally beneficial against both drugs.
That's my understanding of the reasoning behind suggesting broad use, but I could be way off.
Primates and guinea pigs both dropped the ability to synthesize Vitamin C, through different mutations. Now both species have to consume it in their diet to survive.
Incidentally, the story of the broken Vitamin C gene in primates and guinea pigs is the main argument that gets used to show how the theory of evolution is supported. In all primates, including humans, the gene to make Vitamin C is in our DNA, but mutated so that it is not usable. But all primates have the mutated gene in the same place. Guinea pigs have a different mutation to the gene. The chance that all primates had the mutation in the same location simultaneously is very remote, suggesting all primates shared an ancestor that developed the mutation.
Any new antibiotic makes this approach even better, because if you have A, B, C, D, and now E, now the bacteria has to be resistant to all five at once, which is a lot of useless genes to hold onto.
Essentially if we stop treating with the drugs with resistances against them, we'd eventually end up with a bacteria gene pool that resembled the original pre-resistant one, where resistant bacteria were replication errors that were drowned out by natural selection.
The only issue is we can't do that without sacrificing millions of lives. So having a drug that works via completely different mechanisms would fulfil both.
Surely only using it in cases where other antibiotics hadn't proven successful would be a better approach so that you don't give bacteria much opportunity to become resistant.
Broad use of antibiotics in cases where it wasn't needed is exactly how we got into this problem in the first place.
Perhaps learning from history would be the most prudent approach.
I'm assuming their suggestion is to use this drug for the next 30 years, and by the time bacteria become resistant to it we can start using our old antibiotics again.
I'm not qualified to answer either way, I imagine several people could get PhDs finding out. It's too important to handle quickly
Vancomycin is the drug of choice for several major infections that are of a concern to hospitals (MRSA, C. difficile) because there's already pretty established resistance mechanisms. There are definitely some "more last ditch" drugs, but Vancomycin is kind of the first of the "Now we bring out the big guns" antibiotics.
Partially because it's a PITA to give to patients, and has some toxicity problems.
To recoup your costs, you need to sell as much as possible--but in doing so, you render your own product obsolete due to continuing counter-evolution by the target species.