Feeling Sick? Why Not to Start Taking Antibiotics Right Away.
When I worked as a medical scribe in a pulmonology office (for lung-related illnesses), there were a lot of really old, sick patients. Many would come in with symptoms such as congestion or a bad cough and plead with the doctor for a Z-Pak—a dose of a common antibiotic called azithromycin, that is widely overprescribed to treat respiratory infections.
So what’s the problem? Feeling sick with a cough, runny nose and congestion—a dose of antibiotics should fix that, right? Unfortunately, that is a common fallacy in the field of human health.
When you get sick, it isn’t always due to a bacterial infection. There are a couple main pathogen agents (things that cause disease) in humans: bacteria and viruses.
Bacteria are single-cell organisms that can live and reproduce on their own in the environment. Whereas, viruses are essentially tiny organisms that need a host to reproduce—they can’t live and reproduce on their own. In our case, a virus needs to enter a human cell in order to make more copies of itself, hence viruses are parasitic little creatures.
Antibiotics only treat bacterial infections, by killing bacteria that are colonizing in your body. Therefore, taking antibiotics when you have a virus, like the cold or the flu, won’t help.
What about bacteria?
We are COVERED in bacteria. A 2016 study revealed that there are roughly the same number of bacterial cells as human cells in our bodies—between 30 and 39 trillion cells. In fact, they are absolutely crucial for our survival—aiding us with everything from immunity to digestion in our gut.
While a lot of bacteria are not actually harmful to us, some can cause illness. In the past century, the discovery and mass production of antibiotics has been one of the biggest medical successes of our time, saving countless lives from infections that previously would have killed people. But unfortunately, due to over prescription and the improper use of antibiotics, the world of bacteria started a resistance—a fight against our bacteria-killing medications.
Antibiotic resistance in a nutshell
Bacteria reproduce very quickly because they simply split in half—one cell splits into two cells, those two cells become four cells, those four become eight…
If a bacterial cell reproduces every 20 minutes, over a period of 8 hours, one bacterial cell can turn into a colony of over sixteen million bacteria cells.
And because bacteria divide so rapidly and their DNA is constantly being copied, sometimes a mistake happens and a mutation in the DNA is made. Mutation in bacterial DNA happens at a much faster rate than say, humans, who don’t reproduce that often. Sometimes, such mutation results in bacteria having a new gene, one that can protect them from certain antibiotics.
Bacteria are subject to the same selection processes as the rest of nature—the strongest survive. If bacteria are exposed to an antibiotic, the ones who have developed resistance (due to a genetic change)to that antibiotic will survive. And what happens then? The stubborn bacterial cells able to survive against the antibiotic will continue to live and reproduce more and more. Over time, only the bacteria who have resistant genes will be selected to live.
This is unfortunate for human health. People infected with E. Coli used to be easily treated with antibiotics—but some strains of E. Coli have become resistant to drugs that normally have been used to kill them. Which means infections that have been treatable in the past are becoming more dangerous in the future since some of our antibiotics are no longer as effective.
Antibiotics are often used on livestock, so it’s equally important to buy meat from animals that weren’t pumped full of antibiotics. Otherwise, the resistant bacteria that animals have developed can end up in your system too—making you more vulnerable to illness from resistant bacterial infections.
So what can you do?
Bottom line—antibiotics are incredibly useful and save lives, but they are not an end-all-be-all. Antibiotics should only be used when a bacterial infection is actually present, because using antibiotics will NOT treat viruses. Using antibiotics when you don’t need them only increases the chance of bacteria becoming more resistant to such drugs. Some antibiotics also tend to kill a lot of the good bacteria that help us stay healthy, which is why ‘probiotics’ (good bacteria strains) are sometimes taken in conjunction with antibiotics.
Next time you’re feeling sick, go to the doctor and make sure you really have a bacterial infection before trying to take antibiotics—chances are you may not need them!
Cheers,
AT
** Mutation is only one of the ways in which bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics.**
Sources and good reading:
https://mmbr.asm.org/content/74/3/417.full
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/06/036103
CDC website on antibiotics: https://www.cdc.gov/features/antibioticuse/index.html