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One easy way to fight antibiotic resistance? Good hand hygiene

hand wash
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Can washing your hands help stop the evolution of antibiotic resistance? Mathematically, .

save lives by killing 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 the antibiotics are killed off, those that are able to survive will continue to reproduce with less competition. This results in increasing abundance of resistant bacteria that can .

who studies the of antibiotic resistance. During my , I was taught about the importance of hospital hygiene practices like . It is well established that good hygiene can help prevent transmission of harmful bacteria from other people or from the environment. I came to wonder how hygiene affects the evolution of antibiotic resistance.

So I teamed up with my colleagues , , and , experts in mathematics, statistics and microbial evolution, to answer this question.

The effectiveness of antibiotics is under threat from bacteria rapidly evolving resistance against them.

We built a . 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 spreads between patients, and , 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 evolution of antibacterial resistance as hygiene levels increased. This is because evolution toward resistance depends on variation in bacterial sensitivity to . By affecting the distribution of resistant and sensitive bacterial strains across patients, hygiene limits the bacterial diversity needed to evolve resistance.

Research on the evolution of antimicrobial resistance has focused more on evolutionary selection than hygiene. Most studies investigate, for example, whether a is better to prevent resistance. Incorporating and other interventions into research on could help build a more comprehensive understanding of how bacteria evolve to become resistant.

The in preventing illness is already well accepted in practice. Our findings underscore its importance by highlighting the role it plays in the evolutionary process of bacterial resistance.

Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .The Conversation

Citation: One easy way to fight antibiotic resistance? Good hand hygiene (2023, March 1) retrieved 28 May 2025 from /news/2023-03-easy-antibiotic-resistance-good-hygiene.html
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