Comment by mschuster91
4 hours ago
Unfortunately, you can force evolution in bacteria, fungi and viruses. There's more than enough examples of multi-resistant pathogens in all three families, especially in hospitals but also around agriculture (because they use stuff meant as a last-resort to promote animal growth or prevent animals from falling ill to the effects of overcrowding)... honestly between these and prions, I often do wonder how long we as humanity will be able to keep both hospitals and large-scale farming in existence.
Every evolved trait has a cost. We as a civilization have certainly been careless with, say, antibiotic resistance. If we stopped using a certain antibiotic tomorrow and didn't start using it for another 50 years, we'd find that most if not all of the resistant bacteria would've lost that resistance as they'd evolved new traits.
I'm reminded of the pronghorn antelope, a herbivore that evolved fast speed to avoid a predator that no longer exists, a cat having died out 7000+ years ago. It still has that speed but it has a real cost to their metabolism and their need to constantly eat. at some point they're going to lose that if it's not reinforced by some new predator or other evolutionary advantage.
> If we stopped using a certain antibiotic tomorrow and didn't start using it for another 50 years, we'd find that most if not all of the resistant bacteria would've lost that resistance as they'd evolved new traits.
The problem is, for most of the multiresistant species we don't have anything we can use in the 50 years we need to wait for one resistance to be outcompeted. And we haven't discovered any major new class of agents in decades as we cut back foundational research, which makes the situation worse - we don't just have substances, we don't have the pipeline to develop substances.
Sure, for bacteria we got phage therapy, but we lost a lot of the knowledge there during the collapse of the USSR, not all bacteria are suitable for phage usage, phages have their own side effects (including our immune system attacking the phages as well), and we have mRNA based vaccines but these act too late (when the patient has already caught the pathogen) and are useless in immunosuppressed patients such as organ transplant receivers and some cancer patients.