Right now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coupled with the United States Department of Agriculture and the Food Safety Inspection Service, is investigating a foodborne illness outbreak tied to the bacterial contaminant Salmonella Hadar. This strain of Salmonella is especially alarming given that it possesses a unique characteristic which makes it potentially even more deadly —- antibiotic resistance.
Antibiotics have been used for decades to treat bacterial infection. But as a bacterium is exposed to antibiotics for thousands of generations after generations, the bacterium can begin to adapt to the hostile antibiotic environments. As the adaptations occur, antibiotics can become ineffective at preventing the bacteria from infecting and harming victims.
Many have speculated that the overuse of antibiotics by the medical community have led to these antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. Antibiotics are frequently prescribed for illness not related to bacteria, such as viral infections like the flu and the common cold. Antibiotics do not treat these infections but are still often part of the treatment regimen. This overuse of antibiotics is believed to aid in the infecting bacteria’s ability to create new resistant strains as they multiply through the population.
In addition to the theory of over-prescription of antibiotics by the medical community, some believe that patients often take their antibiotics without completing the prescribed regimen. As the bacteria that survived became stronger and multiply, they replace the dead non-resistant bacteria with potentially even more resistant generations.
Others have speculated that the preemptive antibiotic treatment of our nation’s livestock is what is causing the antibiotic resistant bacteria proliferation. It is a common practice of ranchers and farmers to administer antibiotics to animals like cattle and chickens even if the animal is not bacterially infected. The overuse of preemptive antibiotics is believed to render many of the medicines useless to battle the very Salmonella and bacterial infections they were created to treat.
Whatever the reason for the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, they pose unique problems for healthcare providers and food poisoning victims. Severe symptoms may go untreated and hospitalization is often required in order to allow a victim to fully recover from an antibiotic resistant Salmonella infection. In some cases, the antibiotic strain of Salmonella bacteria can even prove to be fatal, especially for the most vulnerable people in our society such as infants and children, the elderly and those with weakened or compromised immune systems.
Richard J. Arsenault, 2011
