Antibiotic Prescription: Allows Bad Gut Pathogen Breathe, Causes Intestinal Infection; Research Reveals

Study details how antibiotics benefit pathogen growth by disrupting oxygen levels and fiber processing in the gut. Thus, pathogens are enabled to breathe which might cause intestinal infection in the duration of the antibiotics treatment.

Antibiotics are necessarily used to fight bacteria infected diseases. Despite the good help it brings to peoples' lives, ironically, they also make the body more prone to infection and diarrhea. It is also inadequately understood how the good bacteria in the gut help to protect against bad bacteria, e.g. Salmonella, and how antibiotics can disturb this relationship by creating situation that support disease-causing microbes, Andreas Bäumler, professor of medical immunology and microbiology from the University of California-Davis reported in the Cell Host & Microbe Journal.

Senior Author Bäumler led the research team which tested on mice. They had identified the chain of events that take place at the gut lumen after antibiotic treatment that allow bad microbe to thrive. The current view of microbes' interaction with one another within the gut surface suggests a profound implication by informing the expansion of new approach to prevent the side effects of antibiotic treatment, the authors wrote in the journal.

In the journal, good microbes including Clostridia in the gut produce anaerobically, in the absence of oxygen, while Salmonella needs oxygen. By making the micro-environment rich in oxygen, the antibiotic action created conditions benefitting the pathogen, Prof. Bäumler explained.

Previous studies had already shown links between low levels of butyrate-producing microbes and inflammatory bowel infection. Meanwhile, further research is now conducted to show if what had been found out is limited to the link between low butyrate and growth of Salmonella, or whether the chain of events also affects other similar mechanisms that could be dangerous to health.

There is no doubt that since 1940s Antibiotics have been used to treat infectious diseases. But the rise of antibiotic resistance, and closer examination of their side effects, is causing reorganization in the ways we use the drugs.