Local Man Furious That Antibiotics Did Nothing for His Cold

A local man was said to be “absolutely livid” this week after a full course of antibiotics failed to cure his common cold, which went away on its own after about a week, exactly as it would have done anyway.

“I took the whole strip,” said the man, speaking through a tissue. “Twice a day, after food, like it says. And I’m still sneezing. I’ve written to the company.”

Scientists contacted for comment confirmed that the antibiotics had worked perfectly, in the sense that they had done exactly what antibiotics do, which is attack bacteria. “Antibiotics are very good at spotting parts of a bacterium that our own cells don’t have, like the tough wall around the outside, and breaking them,” said one. “The problem is that a cold isn’t caused by bacteria. It’s caused by viruses, most often one of the more than a hundred types of rhinovirus. A virus doesn’t have a cell wall. It doesn’t have most of the things an antibiotic is looking for. It’s like sending a sniffer dog trained on explosives to find a lost cat.”

Penicillin, the scientist added, is a good example of how precise these drugs are. A bacterium lives inside a wall made of long sugar chains, cross-linked like the strands of a string bag, which stops it bursting from the pressure of the water it constantly soaks up. As the bacterium grows, it keeps cutting and re-linking that mesh, using its own enzymes. Penicillin jams those enzymes. The bacterium carries on growing, the wall can no longer keep up, and eventually the cell bursts. Human cells have no such wall and no such enzymes, which is why the drug can be so deadly to bacteria and so harmless to us. A rhinovirus, a tiny shell of protein around a strand of genetic code, has no wall either. There was nothing for the drug to jam.

The man’s immune system, which had in fact been dealing with the virus the entire time, declined to comment, citing a heavy workload.

The antibiotics were not entirely without effect, however. Experts noted that they had killed large numbers of harmless bacteria living in the man’s gut, which may explain what the man described as “an unrelated stomach thing on Tuesday”. More worryingly, the course was a small experiment in evolution. Bacteria multiply astonishingly fast, some dividing every twenty minutes or so, and every division is a chance for a random change in their genes. Among the trillions living in and on the man, a few probably already had some trick for surviving the drug: an enzyme that chops penicillin apart, say, or a pump that throws it back out. The antibiotic killed their competitors and left them with all the room in the world. Worse, bacteria can pass such genes to each other directly, on little loops of DNA, even between different species. Use antibiotics often enough, when they aren’t needed, and the survivors multiply and spread, until one day the antibiotic doesn’t work when someone really does need it.

“Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest health problems in the world,” said a doctor. “Every unnecessary course nudges it along. For a cold, the honest prescription is rest, fluids, and a week.”

So what does help with a cold? Honestly, mostly time. Much of what makes a cold miserable, the runny nose, the sore throat, the tiredness, is the immune system fighting the virus rather than the virus itself, and it settles down once the fight is won. Rest, fluids and simple remedies for the symptoms make the week more bearable. Antibiotics are the right medicine when a doctor diagnoses a bacterial infection, such as strep throat, and that is exactly why they need to keep working.

At press time, the man was reported to be recovering well, and telling everyone who would listen about a herbal tea which, he says, cured the cold “in about seven days”.