With the discovery of antibiotics and improvements in sanitation, people felt that bacterial diseases such as the plague had become a thing of the past. However, today bacterial infections cause the deaths of millions of children each year in developing countries. And bacterial infections that are resistant to any form of available treatment are now appearing everywhere in the world. In this lecture, Dr. Finlay will explain why bacterial diseases continue to be a major health problem worldwide and discuss the shortcomings of current methods of prevention and treatment. Bacterial diseases are difficult to defeat because of the very nature of the tiny organisms that cause them.
Bacteria are well adapted to colonize even the harshest environments on earth.
They can easily spread genes among colonies and reproduce as quickly as every 20 minutes. One cell can become a million in a short time, so that strains adapted to surviving new challenges can quickly evolve. From a human standpoint, this means that some species of bacteria are able to evolve quickly enough to evade our defenses and thus cause disease. Antibiotic drugs and vaccines have been our most powerful weapons to date against bacteria, but neither is completely effective. As a result, bacterial infections that are resistant to one or more antibiotics are rapidly becoming commonplace.