Boston, MAA new study released by researchers at Boston University finds that medications like the Cipro antibiotic may be responsible for the rapid development of bacterial infections into so-called superbugs.
The new study, which appears in the journal Molecular Cell, finds that rather than adapting to a single antibiotic and mutating from there, most bacteria develop immunities to multiple drugs at any given time at an accelerated rate. This happens because antibiotics boost bacterial production of free-radical oxygen molecules that damage bacterial DNA.
The repairs to the bacterial DNA cause widespread mutations that allow bacteria to adapt to drugs and develop resistances, resulting in stronger infections that are immune to antibiotics.
"You have a wide range of mutations being introduced across the genome. Some afford resistance to that antibiotic. Some afford resistance to other antibiotics," James Collins, a biomedical engineer and coauthor of the study, told Wired magazine. "It would happen anyways, but this process is accelerating it."
Cipro is one such example. The antibiotic was shown to be effective against 95 percent of E. Coli in 1999, but showed only a 60 percent success rate in 2006.
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