Research led by Andrew Read at Penn State reveals that more effective ways are needed for managing the evolution and slowing the spread of drug-resistant disease organisms like these bacteria, commonly called MRSA, that evolved in hospitals.
In the war between drugs and drug-resistant diseases, is the current strategy for medicating patients giving many drug-resistant diseases a big competitive advantage? That is the question being asked in a research paper that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper argues for new research efforts to discover effective ways for managing the evolution and slowing the spread of drug-resistant disease organisms. The ultimate goal of this new research effort is to develop a new science-based model for drug-resistance management that will inform treatment guidelines for a wide variety of diseases that affect people, including malaria and other diseases caused by parasites, MRSA and other diseases caused by bacterial infections, AIDS and other diseases caused by viruses, and cancer. The research paper, led by Andrew Read, professor of biology and entomology and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State University, reported his lab's recent work on the effect of various medication strategies in groups of malaria-infected mice. "Our results indicate that the current strategy of aggressive use of medications to eliminate all targeted disease pathogens paradoxically gives drug-resistant pathogens the greatest possible evolutionary advantage," Read said. "This universally accepted strategy - which has been the orthodox approach for many decades - may actually promote the proliferation of drug-resistant forms of infectious diseases." The question, said Read, is whether there are ways of treating patients that are equally good at making the patient healthy but give resistant parasites less of an advantage.
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