Society should implement the following procedure to fight off MRSA: 1) Find a strain of bacteria that occupies the same environmental niche as MRSA, but is not resistant to antibiotics. 2) Mass produce this strain in factories, and then spread it by airborne distribution vehicles (maybe drones). This will tilt the evolutionary balance away from the resistant strain and towards the non-resistant strain.
The theory is that most environmental niches will already be maxed out in terms of how much MRSA-like bacteria they can support—if they weren’t, the bacteria would just reproduce more.
So say your backyard can support 1e9 bacteria. Of that, 5e8 is antibiotic-resistant bacteria, while 5e8 is regular bacteria. Then you add another 1e9 regular bacteria. Now the backyard is overcapacity, so the 2e9 bacteria will compete for survival until only 1e9 are left. Assuming that the antibiotic-resistant bacteria has no other advantage over regular bacteria, then after the winnowing there will be 2.5e8 antibiotic-resistant and 7.5e8 regular bacteria—a reduction from 50% to 25%. Every subsequent application of the procedure will exponentially decrease the proportion of resistant bacteria.
More to the point though, any time antibiotics are used the bacterium with antibiotic resistance takes over. There is a reason that it is often spread in hospitals, where sick people on antibiotics are, and in pig farms where ridiculous loads of antibiotics are used to increase growth rates.
What is necessary is breaking the chain of spread from antibiotic-treated niche to antibiotic-treated niche, and making sure there aren’t places like said pig farms where the selective pressure is constantly applied.
This would also increase the number of Staphylococcus relative to other bacteria in the ground. And these bacteria can transfer DNA to each other, including resistance genes. So many of your added bacteria would turn into MRSA, and if there is enough antibiotics in the environment to maintain the MRSA prevalence without your intervention, then you just might end up increasing the amount of MRSA in the region.
This would at best be a temporary solution, since this was pretty much the status quo before MRSA was as big a deal as it is now. The continued presence of antibiotics will exert a selection pressure in favor of MRSA.
If your plan is to spray MRSA into the air forever I’m pretty sure that will lead to far more deaths from untreated or treated too late infections than you would be saving by making some subset of existing infections treatable.
Maybe air-spraying is the wrong distribution method—possibly it would be better to just use trucks or whatever.
There is an adjustable parameter which is how many bacteria we add to the environment per unit time. That parameter controls how quickly the resistant bacteria are replaced by non-resistant bacteria. But regardless of the value, the shape of the function of resistant bacteria population vs time should be exponential decline. So if you are worried about extra infections, you can select a small value for the replacement parameter.
Say you follow a schedule where on the first of every month, you release a bunch of bacteria, increasing the total population in an area by 1%. Then over the course of the month, the population falls back down to its initial value. If you do this for many months, you will eventually cause a large impact to the population of resistant bacteria, while never increasing the aggregate number of bacteria in the environment by more than 1%.
Society should implement the following procedure to fight off MRSA: 1) Find a strain of bacteria that occupies the same environmental niche as MRSA, but is not resistant to antibiotics. 2) Mass produce this strain in factories, and then spread it by airborne distribution vehicles (maybe drones). This will tilt the evolutionary balance away from the resistant strain and towards the non-resistant strain.
Soil bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus, are already everywhere. I don’t see how spreading more of them would reduce the old ones.
The theory is that most environmental niches will already be maxed out in terms of how much MRSA-like bacteria they can support—if they weren’t, the bacteria would just reproduce more.
So say your backyard can support 1e9 bacteria. Of that, 5e8 is antibiotic-resistant bacteria, while 5e8 is regular bacteria. Then you add another 1e9 regular bacteria. Now the backyard is overcapacity, so the 2e9 bacteria will compete for survival until only 1e9 are left. Assuming that the antibiotic-resistant bacteria has no other advantage over regular bacteria, then after the winnowing there will be 2.5e8 antibiotic-resistant and 7.5e8 regular bacteria—a reduction from 50% to 25%. Every subsequent application of the procedure will exponentially decrease the proportion of resistant bacteria.
More to the point though, any time antibiotics are used the bacterium with antibiotic resistance takes over. There is a reason that it is often spread in hospitals, where sick people on antibiotics are, and in pig farms where ridiculous loads of antibiotics are used to increase growth rates.
What is necessary is breaking the chain of spread from antibiotic-treated niche to antibiotic-treated niche, and making sure there aren’t places like said pig farms where the selective pressure is constantly applied.
This would also increase the number of Staphylococcus relative to other bacteria in the ground. And these bacteria can transfer DNA to each other, including resistance genes. So many of your added bacteria would turn into MRSA, and if there is enough antibiotics in the environment to maintain the MRSA prevalence without your intervention, then you just might end up increasing the amount of MRSA in the region.
This would at best be a temporary solution, since this was pretty much the status quo before MRSA was as big a deal as it is now. The continued presence of antibiotics will exert a selection pressure in favor of MRSA.
So.… we keep the factories running. Seems like a small price to pay for the continued effectiveness of antibiotics.
If your plan is to spray MRSA into the air forever I’m pretty sure that will lead to far more deaths from untreated or treated too late infections than you would be saving by making some subset of existing infections treatable.
Maybe air-spraying is the wrong distribution method—possibly it would be better to just use trucks or whatever.
There is an adjustable parameter which is how many bacteria we add to the environment per unit time. That parameter controls how quickly the resistant bacteria are replaced by non-resistant bacteria. But regardless of the value, the shape of the function of resistant bacteria population vs time should be exponential decline. So if you are worried about extra infections, you can select a small value for the replacement parameter.
Say you follow a schedule where on the first of every month, you release a bunch of bacteria, increasing the total population in an area by 1%. Then over the course of the month, the population falls back down to its initial value. If you do this for many months, you will eventually cause a large impact to the population of resistant bacteria, while never increasing the aggregate number of bacteria in the environment by more than 1%.
Yeah, consider it a maintenance problem.