My guess is that we will probably prevent or cure all diseases caused by bacteria eventually many years from now in the future. At the moment though, things are getting worse in some ways. The main drugs that we use to treat bacteria are called antibiotics. Unfortunately, bacteria can evolve quickly and so new types of bacteria are born that are resistant to the antibiotics so they can’t be killed by them. Some bacteria are resistant to lots of different antibiotics and so it’s really difficult to treat them. I think eventually as our technology improves we will be able to prevent or treat all bacterial infections, but this could be 50, 100 or more years from now. Things may get worse first, but I think they will get better in the future.
Thanks for your question 🙂
As a microbiologist, I wouldn’t want to defeat all bacteria – many bacteria are extremely helpful to us and in fact the world would not survive without our co-existence with our microbial friends! We need bacteria in our guts, on our skin, on our treeth etc to keep us healthy, and we use them in many ways as well – to make cheese and yoghurt, to treat our water, to treat oil spill sfor example. So we absoloutely do not want to get rid of bacteria!
They do harm when they are in the wrong place though say -so for example if skin bacteria get inside our tissues through a cut we can get an infection, and they can grow on almost anything and there are some things you do not want bacteria to grow on. As Leo says, more bacteria are now becoming resistant to antibiotics because they evolve faster than we can make new drugs, but many people (including my team) are looking at new ways of fighting bacterial infection without using antibiotics, so using new types of drugs and bandages that do the same job without letting the bacteria get resistant to them. There’s definintely hope!
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joeyshepherd commented on :
As a microbiologist, I wouldn’t want to defeat all bacteria – many bacteria are extremely helpful to us and in fact the world would not survive without our co-existence with our microbial friends! We need bacteria in our guts, on our skin, on our treeth etc to keep us healthy, and we use them in many ways as well – to make cheese and yoghurt, to treat our water, to treat oil spill sfor example. So we absoloutely do not want to get rid of bacteria!
They do harm when they are in the wrong place though say -so for example if skin bacteria get inside our tissues through a cut we can get an infection, and they can grow on almost anything and there are some things you do not want bacteria to grow on. As Leo says, more bacteria are now becoming resistant to antibiotics because they evolve faster than we can make new drugs, but many people (including my team) are looking at new ways of fighting bacterial infection without using antibiotics, so using new types of drugs and bandages that do the same job without letting the bacteria get resistant to them. There’s definintely hope!