Old hands on the LSS blog may be forgiven for thinking antibiotic resistance is all about bacteria, and that it all goes in in hospital with lots of medical folk in white coats and humming machines that do funny things with graphs, and all that sort of thing.
Well, it’s about a lot more than that. It isn’t just bacteria that are resistant to our drugs. Down on the farm, there’s a whole class of creatures called Playtyhelminths (aka flatworms) that can do untold damage to sheep, for example. For years their ravages have been controlled by drugs. Now theses pesky creatures are showing strong resistance to these drugs, And to make matters worse, these drugs are getting into nature from the sheep pastures, and starting to wreak havoc there. It’s a lose-lose situation. And we, that is to say humanity, are the losers.[1]
Why is this happening? It’s Natural Selection in action. The flatworms in the sheep guts are animals like any other. Expose them to a threat, (antagonistic drugs) and most will die. But a very few will carry resistant genes, thrown up by random mutation. They and their offspring will survive, and multiply. Mightily. Just like all those bacteria do with the drugs we send against them. The point is resistance is just an evolutionary response. It will happen everywhere at all times. The trick is to stay ahead of it. And the way to do that is to spend a little more on science and research labs. To plan to educate more people with the scientific habit of mind, where we suspend judgement and become open to evidence. And listen a little less to the kind of unreasoning. emotion driven story telling that pollutes so much of the Information Sphere. Some hope.
CREDIT We got this story by watching an episode of the popular BBC television programme Countryfile. [2] Not quite our normal cup of tea, you might think? Well, its amazing how their light, cheerful style gives you an in to some much deeper issues. Worth the odd watch, we say.
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45027-2
[2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002398g
#flatworms #sheep #agriculture #platyhelminths #antibiotic resistance
Learning, Science and Society 