The menace of drug-resistant diseases is increasing in bounds. Tonsillitis to typhoid fever was being fought against with antibiotics, such as penicillin for more than 50 years! But, the rogue-gallery of these bacteria is rapidly growing resistance against the drug.
Some of the diseases that are increasingly getting harder to the garden-variety antibiotics that scientists have tagged ‘drug resistance’ at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are — tuberculosis, gonorrhea, malaria, and the little kids-plaguing ear infections.
Filutowicz and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison have come up with alternative solution to the increasing nuisance. They have exploited a weakness in the structure of bacteria to curb their growth!
They have used bits of DNA from other kinds of bacteria - displacins - to attack the troublesome plasmids - where some bacteria store their DNA besides the chromosomes. These little DNA chunks are not vital to keep bacteria alive, but let some bacteria cause disease and protect them from antibiotics.
Filutowicz explained,
When you start repopulating your skin, your GI track, your nostrils, all of the non-sterile parts of your body, then opportunistic pathogens have as equal a chance of repopulating your body as the good bacteria.
