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Re:The Bugs Are Winning by jhbadger on Monday June 18, 2018 @07:15AM (#17337298)
It depends on how the resistance works. Some forms of resistance require active effort by the bacterium (for example efflux pumps), and you would expect that in the absence of an antibiotic they would tend to be lost by natural selection. But other forms of resistance are just minor mutations stopping the antibiotic from binding or whatever, and these probably would remain at least in some fraction of the bacterial population as they are more or less neutral.
Re:The Bugs Are Winning by Retric on Monday June 18, 2018 @09:47AM (#17338183)
The human immune system can deal with a huge range of things just fine. So, the metabolic weight from antibiotic resistance is inherently useful for Humans.

Antibiotic resistant bacteria do kill people, but most often as secondary infections due to a compromised immune system. Further, even if the primary infection has near total resistance suppressing secondary infections is still extremely useful.

Re:The Bugs Are Winning by aaron_m04 on Monday June 18, 2018 @10:13AM (#17338385)
Are you saying the adaptations bacteria make to become resistant to antibiotics causes them to be easier targets for the immune system? Do you have a link I could read more about this?
Re:The Bugs Are Winning by Retric on Monday June 18, 2018 @01:01PM (#17339769)
Yes, but not always, and not necessarily for long.

"While the cost of resistance is highly variable, such resistance mutations or genes often come with a fitness cost that reduces the rate of bacterial proliferation (Dahlberg & Chao, 2003; Melnyk et al, 2015)." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5371735/

"The success of resistant mutants critically depends on rapid counterbalancing of the decreased fitness by acquiring compensatory mutations (Levin et al, 1997; Marciano et al, 2007), which in most cases restore normal growth while preserving resistance to the antibiotics (Marcusson et al, 2009). The number and variety of compensatory mutations required to successfully compensate fitness cost varies with organism (Palmer & Kishony, 2013, 2014; Cheng et al, 2014) and the particular environmental conditions under which compensation occurs (Testerman et al, 2006; Hoffman et al, 2010; Toprak et al, 2012; Lindsey et al, 2013)."

Basically, resistance become extremely important so anything that works get's adapted. But, after that point the search for mutations that reduce cost shows up. The second stage also depends on continuous exposure to antibiotics as reverting the mutation in a population is relatively simple.