What can we learn from antibiotic-resistant bacteria?

biological resistance to pesticides, vaccines and antibiotics, as well as to some treatments they impose enormous costs on society, including high morbidity and mortality.

In parallel, there is also a need to promote changes to address other issues, such as the relationship between people and wildlife, to conserve biodiversity and the biosphere.

The truth is that resistance has different meanings in different fields of study. But biologists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who study the resilience of the natural world, believe that knowledge gleaned from some of its smallest inhabitants can help identify barriers to social change, including those needed to resolve human-wildlife conflicts, and frame specific strategies to overcome them.

“We face costly resistance to the social changes needed, for example, to resolve human-wildlife conflicts and conserve biodiversity and the biosphere. By viewing resistance as a force that prevents transition from one state to another, we suggest that biological resistance analysis can provide unique and potentially testable insights into understanding resistance to social change,” the experts said in a paper published in the journal Evolutionary Applications.

Biologists have long studied how agricultural pests become resistant to pesticides and how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. UCLA researchers have identified several effective tactics to counteract this resistance that can help people. make urgently needed changes.

The team built framework for bio-based sustainability management strategies, suggesting that different perspectives on resistance can help identify points of friction between people and the natural world, and between people and their social worlds.

“We apply this concept to consider how it can be used to understand social resistance and generate potentially new hypotheses that may be useful for improving the design of strategies for managing resistance and modulating change in social-ecological systems,” the experts highlighted in the paper. .

It’s just that science has learned a lot over the decades. agricultural and biomedical research on biological sustainability, and the purpose of this new paper was to identify lessons and think about their wider application. To this end, experts have noted that to prevent or control resistance, people must carefully choose treatments that are least likely to be overcome by the body.

The first tactic proposed by scientists was prevention. In agriculture this means Plant different crops and rotate them to avoid pests that feed on certain species.. The same principle could be used to prevent human-wildlife conflicts, for example by not building houses in bear habitats, the authors write. Where conflicts already exist, wildlife can be redirected and discouraged in a variety of ways, such as the use of bear-resistant trash containers.

adaptive therapy combines various strategies control measures that reduce the number of pests or pathogens without killing them all. A social application of this approach is air protection days, when people are encouraged not to drive because the quality of the environment is particularly poor. These tactics mitigate, but do not completely eliminate, air pollution from vehicles.

Despite this, increasing resistance of many bacteria to antibiotics presents the most convincing argument in favor of intimate influence of human behavior on biological evolution and the urgency of its change. It is widely known that overuse and inappropriate use of antibiotics leaves only the most resistant bacteria alive, leading to the emergence of resistant populations. People take antibiotics for many conditions that don’t need them, and they are often given to livestock anyway.

Changing human behavior regarding antibiotic use is critical to preventing the occurrence of new resistant bacterial strains and restore the vulnerability of these populations.. The authors summarized other studies that showed that discouraging doctors from prescribing antibiotics without first testing to determine the most effective option and prohibiting the use of antibiotics in healthy farm animals are two actions that can help overcome bacteria-resistant behavior in animals.

Health care providers may also change the goal of treatment to relieve symptoms rather than kill bacteria. This will leave some vulnerable individuals who can be controlled by natural immunological means, reducing the likelihood that the overall population will become resistant.

Last tactic apply several approaches simultaneously, as a cocktail of drugs used to treat HIV and prevent the development of resistant strains of the virus. No tactic will be enough to stop climate change. To deal with this emergency, we will probably need use all our tools to quickly reduce your carbon footprint global warming needs to be stabilized or even reversed.

For example, we will have to make changes to our transport, energy and food systems. Ideally, these will include attractive upgrades such as affordable and reliable electric vehicles, convenient electric public transportation, and generous subsidies to replace furnaces and heaters with more efficient electric models.

But even such variations will generate some resistance, since it may be difficult or expensive for people to make big changes to their lifestyles and daily routines. The hope is that relatively few will resist change in all of these countries at the same time, thereby reducing net consumption of fossil fuels and energy. Even if there are a few who resist all the changes, enough people will join them to make a difference. The sum of many small changes can have a significant impact.

* Daniel Blumstein is the study’s first author and corresponding author, and is an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. The information contained in this journalistic article is taken from a study entitled “Biological Lessons in the Strategic Management of Resistance” published in the journal Evolutionary Applicationsalso authored by: Norman A. Johnson, Nurit D. Katz, Samuel Harpatin, Xochitl Ortiz-Ross, Eliseo Parra, Amanda Reschke.