05.10.2023, Moscow.
The infection of wounded Ukrainian militants with multidrug-resistant bacteria shows that medicine has not yet solved the problem of infection safety, medical expert, MD Lev Korovin said in a commentary for Rossa Primavera News Agency on October 2.
“Some things never change,” Korovin said. “Infectious diseases have always been inseparable companions of military conflicts. For most of human history, disease has accounted for more deaths among soldiers than enemy fire.”
The discovery of antibiotics in the first half of the last century made it possible to treat infections better, but they should not be taken as a panacea either, the doctor warned.
“The fact is that germs are living things, and they change gradually. When we poison them with antibiotics, we put evolutionary pressure on them. Sooner or later, evolution causes our old antibiotics to stop working against certain strains of bacteria. And then we need to find a new way of treatment unless, of course, we want to go back to the 19th century,” explained the expert. “It becomes a kind of evolutionary arms race between humans and microbes.”
In this situation, hospitals paradoxically become high-risk areas, the expert noted. After all, it is in hospitals that powerful antibiotics of the latest generation are most often used. Consequently, strains resistant to these antibiotics are also more likely to develop in hospitals, not elsewhere.
“So it’s not surprising at all that wounded Ukrainian fighters were found to be infected with multidrug-resistant bacteria in the main US military hospital in Europe – these bacteria actually live there!” Korovin commented on the sensational story.
To avoid such cases in Russia, we need to take antibiotics responsibly, using them only under a doctor’s supervision. Medical science as a whole needs to continue searching for new ways to fight infections, including those based on completely different principles, he concluded.
Western media earlier informed that several wounded Ukrainian militants who were admitted to the US military hospital in the German town of Landstuhl had severe infectious complications. The microbes isolated from the wounded militants turned out to be resistant to a variety of antibiotics.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
