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Asked by mon nen to Shuo, Neil, Martin, Leonie, Lauren, Ciorsdaidh, Alan on 5 Mar 2018.
Question: what's a super bug?
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Lauren Webster answered on 5 Mar 2018:
A super bug is a bacteria that has gotten too clever for its own good, gone rogue if it were! Although bacteria are very small it is very clever. So clever in fact it has the ability to learn. Everything in this world will do anything to survive, even yourself. So how do the bacteria survive when we apply medicine? They mutate (not like X-men)! If you gave the bacteria a drug that kills it, sooner or later the bacteria learn that that drug is bad for them and learn how to make their defence stronger to fight against it. The ability for the bacteria to do this is very efficient so much so that we now only have one antibiotic left that can fight against bacterial infections – even as I type the bacteria are thinking of ways to build a better defence against this.
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Alan McCue answered on 5 Mar 2018:
Looks like Lauren has beaten me to the answer here 🙂 and I think her answer is fab anyway!
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Leonie Bole answered on 5 Mar 2018:
Agreed, Alan! Although it seems like Lauren is the expert here! Slightly disappointed I’ll never be able to join Prof. Xavier’s team, however…
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Shuo Zhang answered on 8 Mar 2018:
Superbugs are some deadly microbes which own drug-resisting properites. The overuse of antibiotics has greatly contributed to the evolve of harmful bacteria, making some of them adapt to severe environment and set up a clever drug-resisting mechanism to survive. However, there are still ways to defeat them. Recently scientists in U.S tried to apply phage, a kind of virus targeting bacterial, to efficiently kill bacterial and have made great success in clinical trials. They even combined artificial intelligence with this therapy, using computer programmes and databases to quickly select corresponing types of phages for targeted bacterial of infectious patients. Sounds brilliant!
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Neil Keddie answered on 14 Mar 2018:
What’s a superbug? REALLY bad news is what it is!
Superbugs are bacteria that we do not really have any effective treatments against. These bacteria can mutate very quickly, meaning the only drugs that could work against them might stop working (especially if they are clever enough to work out a resistance to them). Not kept in check, these bacteria could cause many deaths in the future from infections and diseases that we simply treat with antibiotics at the moment.
So how can we help to stop these superbugs coming to get us? The key thing is to reduce our use on antibiotics in everything from food production to treatments for common colds, so we can preserve them for a time when we really need them. We still have some last line of defence antibiotics, like Vancomycin, but some of the superbugs found are starting to become resistant to these too. This is a problem!
So what’s the solution? Well, simple as it sounds, we need to develop new antibiotics – but this is difficult to do. Drug companies traditionally did not invest as much money towards drugs that we only need occasionally (like antibiotics), rather than drugs we need everyday (like drugs to treat diabetes, heart diseases, high cholesterol). The attitude of the big companies is changing and more money is being invested, as the antibiotic resistance problem is recognised as one of the big challenges for the future. New sources of antibiotics (such as natural products from the sea or soil) are being identified, but these will just be the start of the development journey – you need to isolate the active components, find a way to make them chemically, or find a way to get cells to produce them by fermentation and all of that is before you can start to get a new medicine to market (ask me about that in another question if you want to know more).
I hope we can get there – I don’t exaggerate when I say that the future of humanity depends on it!
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