What Medical Science Could Learn from Agriculture

Bacterial drug resistance resistance is very similar problem to the problem farmers face with weed control. Bacteria mutate to defeat in the same way weeds mutate to defeat weed killers.

At the Farm Progress Show in Indiana Dr Harry Stek stated that  diverse weed control approaches on the farm are a must.

“First we have to take a step back and see what got us into some of these problems, and that’s using the same thing over and over and over,” he said, “and of course weeds will find a way to figure out how to overcome this and become resistant. So, diversity includes chemical diversity, but also rotating crops, rotating HT traits so that gives you more opportunity to rotate to different chemistries, but also including non-chemical methods that help control and reduce the selection pressure for resistance.”

Strek says. “It’s how many times you apply and you only have a limited number of cycles before you can develop resistance. Unfortunately resistance development has a long period where you’re selecting for these genes that confer resistance and you really can’t see them. They’re kind of in the background noise. And then all of a sudden it enters an exponential phase, so year one you have solitary soldiers, solitary plants. Year two you have bigger patches and then year three it takes over your field and it’s consistently seen in that pattern, that it hits an exponential phase and takes it over. And you don’t want that to happen because then it’s too late.”

Weed resistance to Roundup. Farmers thought that they could use less weed killers by using GMO crops and Roundup. Because they continued to use the same pesticide year after year the weeds developed resistance.

A good example of how these same principles apply to bacterial drug resistance is demonstrated in the E coli 104H4 outbreak in Germany and France that killed 50 people.

Before this outbreak there were only two recorded outbreaks of E coli 104H4 In these two outbreaks only four people were involved. To everyones surprise  E coli 104H4 developed resistance to every antibiotic except one.

In the 1940’s we became so enamored with antibiotics that we stopped using Phage Therapy to treat bacterial diseases in the United States. Instead of using both therapies to fight bacteria with only one making it easier for the bacteria to develop resistance.

If we did start using Phage Therapy again, it would actually  reduce the amount of drug resistance to antibiotics. Some of the genes that cause drug resistance actually make bacteria weaker, so If you reduce the presents of antibiotics some bacteria will change.

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