Scenario:A 4-month-old infant had been running a moderate fever for 36 hours, an

Question

Scenario:A 4-month-old infant had been running a moderate fever for 36 hours, and a nervous mother made a call to her pediatrician. Examination and testing revealed no outward signs of infection or cause of the fever. The anxious mother asked the pediatrician about antibiotics, but the pediatrician recommended watching the infant carefully for two days before making a decision. He explained that decades of rampant use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture had caused a worldwide surge in bacteria that are now resistant to such drugs. He also said that the reproductive behavior of bacteria allows them to exchange antibiotic resistance traits with a wide range of other disease-causing bacteria, and that many strains are now resistant to multiple antibiotics. The physician’s information raises several interesting questions.

Question:
A)Was the physician correct in saying that bacteria can share resistance?

B)If the infant was given an antibiotic as a precaution, how might it contribute to the production of resistant bacteria?

Explanation / Answer

Yes, the physician was correct that bacteria can share resistances. Bacteria can use conjugation to make a genetic link between each other using sex piluses. Bacteria can then exchange plasmids, circular chunks of DNA; or gene cassettes coding for antibiotic resistance between each other and splice the foreign DNA to become part of their own DNA, enabling different types of bacteria to share antibiotics resistances between each other. If the infant was given an antibiotic as a precaution, then all the bacteria who are not resistant to the antibiotic will die off, leaving only resistant bacteria that will become the dominant bacteria in the infant.

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