How antibiotic-resistant bacteria can teach us to change our behaviors

Most people want to do something about climate change, but the compromises on lifestyles and the increasingly narrow window to implement broad changes in industrial, transportation and consumption patterns are daunting enough to encourage them to resist.

Resistance has different meanings depending on the field of study. But UCLA biologists who study resistance in the natural world think information gleaned from some of its smallest inhabitants could help identify obstacles to social change, including those needed to resolve conflicts between humans and wildlife, and to formulate specific strategies to overcome them.

Biologists have long studied how agricultural pests become resistant to pesticides and how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. In an article published in Scalable applications.

The team built a framework of strategies for managing biologically-based resistance, suggesting that different views of resistance can help identify points of friction between humans and the natural world, and between humans and their worlds. social.

“We have learned a lot from decades of agricultural and biomedical research on biological resistance and our goal with this paper was to identify lessons and think about their broad application,” said corresponding author Daniel Blumstein, an evolutionary biologist at the department. in Ecology and Ecology from UCLA. Evolutionary biology. “We noted that to prevent or manage resistance, we must carefully select the treatment least likely to be overcome by an organism.”

The first tactic: prevention. In agriculture, this involves planting various crops and rotating them to prevent the establishment of pests that feed on specific crops. The same principle could be invoked to prevent human-wildlife conflicts, for example by not building houses in bear habitats, the authors write. Where conflicts already exist, wildlife can be redirected and deterred through various means, such as bear-resistant dumpsters.

“Adaptive therapy” combines a variety of control strategies that reduce pests or pathogens without killing them all. A social application of this approach is “save the air” days, during which people are asked not to drive because air quality is particularly poor. This tactic mitigates, but does not entirely eliminate, air pollution from vehicles.

Yet the growing resistance of many bacteria to antibiotics provides the most compelling argument for the intimate influence of human behavior on biological evolution – and the urgency to change that behavior. It is widely accepted that the overuse and misuse of antibiotics leaves only the most resistant bacteria alive, thus leading to resistant populations. People take antibiotics for many conditions that don’t require them and often give them to livestock unnecessarily.

Changing human behavior around antibiotic use is crucial to preventing the emergence of new resistant bacterial strains and restoring the vulnerability of resistant populations. The authors summarized other studies showing how discouraging doctors from prescribing antibiotics without first testing to determine the most effective option – and banning the use of antibiotics in healthy farm animals – could help overcome the resistant behavior of bacteria.

The medical profession may also change the goal of treatment toward symptom relief instead of eradicating the bacteria. This would leave some individual bacteria vulnerable which could be managed by natural immunological means, reducing the likelihood that the population as a whole would become resistant.

The final tactic is to deploy multiple approaches at once, such as the cocktail of drugs used to treat HIV and prevent the evolution of resistant strains of the virus.

No single tactic will be enough to stop climate change in its tracks.

“To address the climate emergency, we will likely need to use everything at our disposal to bring about the rapid reduction in atmospheric carbon needed to stabilize or even reverse global warming,” Blumstein said.

For example, we will need to make changes to our transportation, energy and power systems, he said. Ideally, these would be attractive changes such as affordable and reliable electric cars, convenient electric public transport and generous subsidies to replace stoves and radiators with more efficient electric models.

“But even attractive changes will be met with some resistance, because it can be difficult or expensive for people to make big changes to their lifestyle and routines,” Blumstein said. “The hope is that relatively few people will resist all the changes simultaneously, and thus we will reduce our net consumption of fossil fuels and energy. Even if there are a few holdouts who resist any change, enough people will will join us to make a decision.Moreover, the sum of a large number of small changes can have a substantial impact.