Thus when someone who does not engage in over usage of antibiotics the strain is resistant enough to not be killed and it becomes even more resistant to antibiotics.
Is that correct?
The details are ridiculously complex. Scientists have only begun recently mapping the human biome. So a good introduction starts with what we do know, in smaller bites.
The overwhelming majority of microorganisms in our bodies are viruses. We don’t have a clue as to how many different kinds, but we do know that about half of them are bacteriophage, bacteria eating, that help keep our bacteria under control. We also know that some are interactive with our immune system and metabolism.
The human intestinal flora (biome) has from 300-1000 different kinds of bacteria. But just 30-40 kinds take up almost all of the physical space. In doing so, they “shoulder out” other bacteria, good and bad. They have no room to increase, so their levels stay about the same.
The 30-40 kinds are divided into the evolutionarily newer, aerobic bacteria that live in our upper digestive tract (mostly phylum firmicutes), and the older bacteria that live in our lower intestines and colon (mostly phylum bacteroidetes). The newer bacteria are very good at digesting the food we eat, which releases nutrients that we can absorb. The older bacteria, less so.
Most fermented food products are made with firmicutes, or the non-bacteria yeasts. There is only one predominant yeast in our bodies, and it mostly digests sugars. Too much of it and you get a yeast infection, just about anywhere in the body.
There are lots of other microorganisms in there as well, including protozoa, fungi, parasites, and one real oddity, called an Archaea. Archaea look like bacteria, but are so different they are an entirely different *domain* of life. They are more closely related to plants and animals than they are to bacteria. They also do not eat what bacteria eat. The type that lives in humans eats hydrogen gas, for example.
Hydrogen gas is produced by bacteria when they digest the food they eat, and it limits bacterial growth. So when the Archaea eats the hydrogen, it means the bacteria can more thoroughly digest our food, giving us more nutrition.
At this point enters antibiotics: the nuclear weapons of the biome. They wipe out vast numbers of bacteria, bad and good. But those bacteria that survive quickly become more resistant to it. Since most reproduce about every half an hour, resistance in subsequent generations happens rapidly.
This is why they always say to take *all* the antibiotics you have been prescribed. If you don’t wipe out the pathogen, it will recover and be far more resistant.
And resistance means that the next time an antibiotic is used, the healthy bacteria are cleared from much of the space, and the resistant bacteria can have a “bloom”. And this can be deadly.
Lumped under the category of “sepsis”, the CDC has declared sepsis a medical emergency that kills 258,000 people a year nationally. These are newer stats than those I used earlier. A ten-fold jump. Sepsis now kills more Americans than do heart attacks.
Leaving on a high note, consuming live culture firmicutes is a great way to protect yourself from resistant bacteria. One of the better ways is a drink, that tastes like a yogurt smoothy, but has 10-12 different digestive bacteria cultures in it is called “Kefir”, and is now available in many grocery stores.
Many doctors are already advising their patients taking antibiotics to drink kefir in between doses, to help restore the intestinal flora and prevent DR infections by not giving them the space to have a bloom.