Antimicrobial Resistance...the untold story

I guess that I spend a good fraction of my life thinking about antibiotic resistance. Probably more than sleeping, but less than my friends and families. It's fun to think about resistance because all of the processes that cause it occur inside of a little cell that is only a few microns in diameter. I think about bacteria in cross sections and when I do that, they seem like video game screens with enzymes running around like Pacman and chewing up the antibiotics, or changes in cell walls that are like a force field that keeps antibiotics from getting in.

It's fun to think about them this way, but always, in the back of my mind are the articles I read that describe elderly people dying from multidrug resistant urinary tract infections (Since when did those become lethal?), multidrug resistant pneumonia that they acquired in the hospital, and multidrug resistant skin infections from minor abrasions. Those weigh on me heavily. I remeber reading a bunch of articles about sepsis and septic shock and wondering what those terms meant. I literally started crying when I read a definition that included the phrase "liquification of internal organs". Who knew that was so common?

Last year, more people in America died of multidrug resistant Staph aureus than AIDS. That's only the tip of the iceberg of resistance. That is only one organism and there are so many resistant organisms.

My mood changes from sad to angry when I think about how few resources are given to solving this problem. In the US, there are no major lobbying groups for this problem, no private organizations dedicated to it, and very few federal funds available for studying and solving this problem. Research from developing countries in Latin America has already surpassed US research of drug resistance on some fronts!

I am not sure what to do about this problem. I give much of my time and thought to researching resistance. Sometimes I think I have nothing more to give to the problem, but then I think, maybe there is a little more I can do. So, I am going to start keeping a blog about this problem. Hopefully it will be more enjoyable than a text book and more relevant.