Why does the antibiotic sometimes work slowly or it doesn’t at all?
The answer to the question you must have asked yourself at least once – why does the antibiotic not work?
British scientists from the University of Cambridge have noticed mistakes that reduce the effectiveness of antibiotics. It turns out that if there are several types of bacteria or other pathogens in the body, it will be much harder to cure.
And they confirmed that with an experiment. Using innovative technology, the experts spent a week cultivating a mixture of different microbes. This was extremely difficult to do because usually one pathogen prevents the development of another and kills it. The researchers used so-called polymicrobial infections, which included Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus, as well as the fungal infection Candida albicans, a combination commonly found in the respiratory tract of people with cystic fibrosis.
The scientists then added an antibiotic that is very effective in killing the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. However, when other pathogens were present along with this bacterium, the antibiotic did not work. The same effect was observed when the samples were treated with fusidic acid (an antibiotic for the treatment of Staphylococcus aureus) and fluconazole (an antibiotic that aims to kill the fungus Candida albicans).
As a result, many more antibiotics have been shown to be effective in killing bacteria in polymicrobial infection. This knowledge should be of great help in testing the effectiveness of new drugs against a mixture of various infections and microbes.
