• Question: In terms of bacterial resistance, are we going to see rapid big leaps in the evolutionary arms race whereby the human immune system will fight back.

    Asked by GMa to Abid, Donna, Sanjib, Thomas, Avril on 15 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Donna Johnson

      Donna Johnson answered on 15 Jun 2017:

      Some people are working on this though its been quite a small area of antimicrobial treatment research, so probably not massive leaps forward for the time being. As antibiotic resistance increases though, more people are starting to think about alternative ways to treat so the research will probably continue. If its seen to be successful then more people may start working on it and then we might see big leaps.

    • Photo: Thomas Booth

      Thomas Booth answered on 16 Jun 2017:

      We have one major disadvantage against bacteria in an arms race like you’ve described. And that is that the human race evolves much more slowly. To massively oversimplify, it takes (at minimum) 16 years for the humans to go through one generation (i.e. from a child being born to that person having children of their own). This means it would take at least that time for any effect of selection to spread through the population. With many bacteria, their doubling time is less than an hour (140,000x faster than humans!)! This means they can evolve much more rapidly than us. This is why we need research, because that is a fight we are unlikely to win!

    • Photo: Avril Tucker

      Avril Tucker answered on 18 Jun 2017:

      Good question! I’m not sure our immune system is going to change considerably but I do think that we will start to make and develop new strategies to fight infection, even multi-drug resistant infections.

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