The Functional Resistance of Bacterial Biofilms

Abstract

There is intellectual coherence when a physician must tell patients that the bacteria causing their infection have tested resistant to the empiric antibiotic therapy, and that an alternative drug must be used. In this chapter, we will concern ourselves with the growing number of bacterial infections in which antibiograms of the causative organism show sensitivity to standard antibiotics in readily attainable concentrations, but the infection fails to be cleared. This discrepancy is troubling and frustrating for patients, physicians, and diagnostic laboratories alike, but it can now be resolved by concepts that have become widely accepted in microbial ecology