Can washing your hands help stop the evolution of antibiotic resistance? Mathematically, it’s possible.
Antibiotics save lives by killing bacteria that cause infections. But antibiotics don’t just kill infection-causing bacteria or stay in the area of the body where the infection is occurring. Instead, antibiotics spread across the body and inhibit or kill any sensitive bacteria they encounter.
While bacteria that are more sensitive to antibiotics are killed off, those that are able to survive will continue to reproduce with less competition. This results in an increased abundance of resistant bacteria that can undermine the effectiveness of the antibiotic.
I am a researcher who studies the evolution of antibiotic resistance. During my medical training, I was taught about the importance of hospital hygiene practices like hand disinfection. It is well established that good hygiene can help prevent the transmission of harmful bacteria from other people or from the environment. I came to wonder how hygiene affects the evolution of antibiotic resistance.
I came to wonder how hygiene affects the evolution of antibiotic resistance.
So I teamed up with my colleagues Magnus Aspenberg, Sara Maad Sasane, Fredrik Nilsson, and Sam Brown, experts in mathematics, statistics, and microbial evolution, to answer this question.
We built a mathematical model of antibiotic resistance evolution. In this model, resistant and sensitive bacteria compete in the microbial communities living in patients and transmit from one patient to another. We studied the effects of two parameters: hygiene (or use of an alcohol-based hand rub), which limits how much bacteria spread between patients, and antibiotic use, which selects for resistant bacteria by killing sensitive ones.
We found that hygiene and antibiotic use interact. Antibiotic use had less of an effect on the ..
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