Rifaximin is commonly used to treat liver disease
uk.yahoo.com
And it reminds me I’ve sometimes wondered if antibiotic resistance is something that can increase without limit?
Surely for a bacteria to become resistant to an antibiotic it has to change in some way? So is there no sense in which that’s a zero-sum game, i.e. that in becoming resistant to one anti-biotic does it not open itself up to some other one? I get the impression that’s not the case, that there are in fact a finite number of antibiotics and the danger is a pathogen could become resistant to every one of them, but I don’t understand why it works like that.
My naive thought is that to become resistant to _every_ type of antibiotic a bacteria would have to be infinitely complicated, with so many different ‘defences’ that it wouldn’t function as a bacteria any more? Like a tank with such thick armour it can no longer move.
I mean, with, say, military hardware, it’s an arms-race, and for each measure there’s a counter-measure and a counter-counter-measure, and so on. Why is it so hard to find new “attack vectors” when bacteria mutate? Why is it such a one-sided arms race?
