LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Antibiotic: Antibiotic Resistances
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Does antibiotic use on plants pose a risk to human health? This question is the subject of contentious debate in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. One consumer advocacy group in the U.S. has gone so far as to call for a ban on antibiotics used as pesticides (21). Growers... defend their practice as being so limited in scope as to be inconsequential to the emergence of antibiotic resistance in hospitals and communities. With almost no research data to uphold either view, arguments are frequently based on circumstantial evidence and fueled by passion.
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Use or misuse of antibiotics may result in the development of antibiotic resistance by the infecting organisms, similar to the development of pesticide resistance in insects. Evolutionary theory of genetic selection requires that as close as possible to 100% of the infecting organisms be killed off to avoid selection of resistance; if a small subset of the population survives the treatment and is allowed to multiply, the average susceptibility of this new population to the compound will be much less than that of the original population, since they have descended from those few organisms that survived the original treatment. This survival often results from an inheritable resistance to the compound that was infrequent in the original population, but became more frequent in the descendants.
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Additionally, few broad-spectrum antibiotic agents are currently in development. Antibiotic development has slowed to the point that FDA has had few opportunities to approve new agents. In fact, development and approvals of new antibacterial agents have decreased by 56 percent over the past 20 years (1998-2002 vs. 1983-1987). New classes of antibiotics are needed to address increasing antibiotic resistance among common pathogens.
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One side effect of misusing antibiotics is the development of antibiotic resistance by bacteria. By 1984 half the people with active tuberculosis in the United States had a strain that resisted at least one antibiotic. Between 1985 and 1991 tuberculosis increased 12 per cent in the US and 300 per cent in Africa where HIV and TB are often found together.
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A new antibiotic resistance gene could evolve in a bacterium from "scratch" (through mutation of another gene useful for something else) because of selection pressure caused by exposure to antibiotics. All antibiotic resistance genes got their start this way. This process is thought to take place very slowly-- despite the presence of trillions and trillions of bacteria on the planet, there are relatively few different antibiotic resistance genes.
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* There is little scientific doubt remaining that horizontal gene transfer is responsible for creating new pathogens and multiple antibiotic resistance. The escalation in the emergence of pathogens and antibiotic resistance over the past decade coincides with the commercialization of genetic engineering biotechnology.
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Antibiotic Resistances