Stopping the Rise of Superbugs by Making Them Fight For Food
A new strategy prevents parasites from adapting to drugs by intensifying the competition between them.
The history of antibiotics is a history of running in place. Two years after the first of these life-saving drugs—penicillin—was mass-produced, bacteria that resisted the drug became widespread, too. With grim inevitability, the same events have unfolded for every other drug. Every time scientists identify a new substance that can hold back the tide of infectious disease, resistant superbugs surge over that barrier in a matter of years.
The evolution of drug-resistant microbes is unavoidable, but it’s not instantaneous. And one might reasonably wonder why. Microbes have been around for billions of years. They have had, quite literally, all the time in the world to inventresistant to all drugs?
