Question: As antibiotics are used a lot will humans eventually adapt to become immune to them?

Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 23 Jun 2015:

Very good question. Antibiotics are used to kill the bacteria and it doesn’t interact directly with human cells so humans won’t adapt to antibiotics themselves.

It’s the bacteria that adapt to the antibiotics.

Because bacteria can replicate very quickly (bacteria replicate in minutes, whereas us humans take 9 months to produce offspring), bacteria replicates can adapt (in science they like using the word mutate) quickly and pass on that adaptation to future offspring. This happens to the point that all bacteria offspring have become “immune” to the antibiotic and they no longer work.

This happens all of the time. MRSA which you may have heard of in the news stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which means it has become resistant to the antibiotic called methicillin. This is one example.

We can slow down bacteria becoming resistant by making sure that if you take antibiotics, that you follow the doctors advice and take the entire course of antibiotics.