Good gut bacteria vs. bad: What we learned about antibiotic resistance from a community in Nairobi
Years of antibiotic use have fueled a rise in bacteria that can survive antibiotics. These antibiotic-resistant bacteria are competing with and displacing other bacteria that are naturally present in the human gut, where they play a critical role in maintaining good health. Resistant bacteria have led to increased illness and death from diseases that were once easily treatable with antibiotics.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are on the rise due to excessive use of antibiotics. These resistant strains displace and outcompete beneficial gut bacteria, leading to increased illness and death from once treatable diseases. Disease ecologist Eric Ngeno analyzed the presence of resistant E. coli bacteria in the guts of healthy individuals in a densely populated urban informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya.
He found that the background microbial community, which consists of the native nonresistant bacteria people naturally have in their guts, largely determined which E. coli strains people ended up carrying. People living in areas with a larger share of invasive resistant bacteria in their local microbial community were more likely to carry resistant E. coli strains.
In contrast, those in areas where the local microbial communities mostly included native nonresistant bacteria were less likely to carry resistant E. coli strains. This discovery suggests that local microbial communities play a crucial role in determining the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, rather than just antibiotic use.
Antibiotics that severely disrupt the gut microbiota facilitate the takeover by invading resistant bacteria, while milder antibiotics tend to preserve the original gut microbiota that competes with incoming microbes. Therefore, preventive efforts should be tailored to the local microbial community context to minimize antibiotic resistance.
Strategies include minimizing antibiotic disruption, facilitating the spread of harmless microbes, encouraging the use of probiotics, and promoting the long-term farming of the microbiome, which involves creating a continuous culture of good bacteria in the body.
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