"How much antibiotic? The problem of treating patients while minimizing resistance evolution."
Andrew F. Read
Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics

Pennsylvania State University

 

Physicians frequently implore patients to keep taking antibiotics long after they feel better. This strategy minimizes the number of drug-sensitive microbes that can become drug resistant. But it does so by maximizing the evolutionary advantage for any that are. Balancing this double-edged sword of resistance management while restoring patient health is a very hard problem. I will discuss the issues involved, and report our on-going experiments with animal and mathematical models which suggest that, current physician advice must be wrong at least some of the time.