Escape The Ant Colony

 

Here's a really bad science joke that I've heard.

Why don't ants get sick?

Because they have little anty bodies.

 I'll get my coat.

That's not the only link between ants and disease prevention. I was listening to a podcast the other day where the discussion was about antibiotic resistance. This is a huge problem, which has lots of doctors and scientists are very worried. Antibiotic resistance is when antibiotics no longer kill bacteria. You can take the tablets, but they won't make you better. To understand why doctors are concerned we need to look back at what life was like before antibiotics.  

In 1941 Police Constable Albert Alexander was injured in an air raid. A small cut near his mouth became infected and he was taken to hospital.  The infection got worse, and he developed sepsis, which is when your immune system overreacts to an infection and starts attacking your own organs. Most people who develop sepsis die. Doctors in 1941 were used to seeing people succumb to infections, as they only had poor treatments that didn't work well. Mostly the patients could only wait and hope that the illness would clear by itself. 

This was the situation Albert Alexander found himself in, but there was a ray of hope. Two scientists, Florey and Chain, had developed a new drug that had cleared infections from mice. They had made enough of this medicine, penicillin, to try it on a person. Albert Alexander was injected with the new treatment over four days. He started to get better, but unfortunately there was only a small supply of the drug, and when it ran out, he became ill again and died.

Since those days, we have become used to being able to take antibiotics to cure an infection. We take for granted that childbirth, operations and small wounds are safer because antibiotics reduce the risk of infections. Antibiotic resistance could put an end to this.

To discover how antibiotic resistance develops click here.

To complete an antibiotic resistance escape room, click here

Where do ants fit into this story? Well, scientists have been looking for new antibiotics to replace those that have stopped working.  They have discovered that ants are covered in microbes, which produce chemicals which protect the colony from disease. Could ant microbes be the source of new antibiotics? Watch this space.