Question

1.Discuss two reasons why some antibiotics show greater evidence of bacterial resistance than others.

2.It is becoming more and more common to find antibiotic-resistant bacteria outside of medical facilities, in the community. Still drug-resistant bacteria (that infect hospital patients) are rarely found outside of the hospital environment. Explain this paradox: why do resistant bacteria not multiply & spread outside hospitals, replacing sensitive bacteria in the community at large?

Answer 1

Q.1 Antibiotic resistance is generally passed down to generation in bacteria. So antibiotic resistance itself a trait which shows that bacteria has resistance capability to survive the chemicals which affect the other bacteria of same species. This is primary evidence of resistance in bacteria

Another way this shows resistance in bacteria is that in many cases the resistance is associated with plasmid which carries resistance to other environmental hazards as well as broad substrate utilization capability (like lac operon for lactose metabolism).

Q.2 Hospitals and medical facilities are always maintained hygenic via chemical and physical treatments which kills off most of microbial population. It means only those microbe can survive which carries resistance, especially antibiotic resistance. This is the reason why antibiotic resistant bacteria generally found in hospitals, because there is less competition from other microbial species.

However outside the hospital environment there is huge population of resistant as well as non resistant microbes which severely affect their survivability. It also have chances to expose to antimicrobial substances to which bacteria might not be resistant.