Tejerina Shell
Valencia, June 16 (EFE).- The misuse and abuse of antibiotics is one of the possible causes of bacteria adapting and becoming “more resistant and virulent”, a “silent pandemic” that should be addressed with a good diagnosis to the patient to determine whether or not it is necessary to administer that drug, and promoting research to obtain new antibacterial medications.
“It can be a very serious problem but today it is not. There are still many things that we do not understand and it is difficult to manage,” José Rafael Penadés, professor of Microbiology at Imperial College London and professor, said in an interview with EFE. researcher at the CEU Cardenal Herrera University (CEU UCH) in Valencia, who has just been named a member or ‘Fellow’ of the British Royal Society.
One of his achievements is the discovery of a new pathway for transferring genetic information between bacteria, “lateral transduction”, which helps to understand how the most dangerous bacteria due to their resistance to antibiotics adapt and evolve rapidly, becoming more virulent. and they go to hosts that they could not infect before or they adapt to places where they could not live before.
“The most striking thing is the part in which these mechanisms can cause bacteria that were not resistant to antibiotics to do so and become pathogenic quickly,” says Penadés, who began his academic and scientific career in Valencia, in In 2013 he joined the Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation at the University of Glasgow, and since 2020 he has directed the Center for Bacterial Resistance Biology at Imperial College London.
Penadés, who is a trained veterinarian although the basic research he carries out is applied to both humans and animals, focuses his interest on ‘Staphylococcus aureus’, a bacteria that lives in the nose without causing any type of disease but can become a of the “major causes of death” in hospitals because it is one of the main agents involved in nosocomial infections.
He points out that this bacteria, with three million genetic bases, has the “ability” to infect many different hosts, both humans and dogs, sheep, goats, horses, chickens, rabbits or dolphins.
“We want to understand what mechanisms make such a seemingly insignificant thing have the ability to have evolved to infect so many different hosts,” he says.
According to him, “small changes in bacteria produce important consequences and make them have the capacity to produce some type of disease,” and he gives as an example that although the majority of the bacteria we have in the intestine are benign and only a few are pathogenic, The consumption of antibiotics kills the good ones and causes the resistant ones to expand.
“Antibiotics have not created resistance, there have been bacteria during evolution that use these drugs to eliminate their competitors. It is a very old mechanism, but by constantly selecting these resistant bacteria, we are creating a problem,” he explains.
The number of deaths associated with bacteria that are resistant to drugs has grown and is expected to continue increasing, warns Penadés, who indicates that there are countries concerned because in some patients surgical procedures could be compromised due to the possibility of an infection in the hospital. , “when it should be the safest place.”
Although at the moment there are treatments for most bacteria, he warns that the use of antibiotics should be reduced to avoid this increase in resistance, as well as promoting more research to obtain new medications that can address this “silent pandemic.”
In this last aspect, he points out that pharmaceutical companies have decided, and “are within their rights”, that the development of new antibiotics is not as profitable as that of drugs against diabetes or other long-term chronic diseases, since their Marketing would be limited and resistance would appear shortly after. “There aren’t many new antibiotics recently,” he laments.
Considers that the third world could be the origin of many multi-resistant bacteria due to the “massification” in which they live and the “indiscriminate and uncontrolled use” of antibiotics, a problem that different organizations try to alleviate with quick and simple diagnoses and controlling the administration of those drugs.
“There are many things that we do not know but we must be prepared to try to minimize the negative part of what may happen, have better treatments, better diagnoses to administer antibiotics to those who really need them and be able to face what may come in better conditions. “, he asserts.
Asked if this resistance of bacteria to antibiotics could lead to a zoonosis, an animal-to-human contagion, he states that pandemics “go in both directions” and both humans and animals can be the origin of a viral or bacterial infection. .
“All these processes of species jumping or zoonoses are associated with processes of overcrowding, in farms where there are many animals or in cities where many people live,” he indicates to clarify that the immune system eliminates the majority of these bacteria or viruses. EFE
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