I just have a quibble with the term “strength” when applied to antibiotics. It comes to me thru Dr. John Bartlett, who tried to teach me about infectious disease back in my med student days. He always cautioned us about not using terms like “you need a stronger antibiotic”.
So many patients ask for the strongest antibiotic available. I ask them if they would use a sledge hammer to drive carpet tacks.
In place of strength (which to me means the dose of the drug in milligrams) I prefer to to think of meds like Vancomycin as very broad spectrum antibiotics, with a lot of potential toxicities and side-effects.
So, to sum it up and see if I do understand: A drug can be broad-spectrum and broadly effective against severely mutated strains at the expense of being more broadly toxic (potentially), or it can be more focused, less effective against the bizarre mutants, but less likely to make you throw up (among other things).
Sort of, but not always, Derleth. You also have very many narrow-spectrum drugs which are toxic, and some fairly broad spectrum ones are pretty benign. There’s some correlation between breadth of spectrum and greater toxicity but it’s not real linear.
Of course, the most effective treatment to eradicate all bacteria and viruses from an individual is to throw the individual in a furnace. Very broad spectrum in virtually all circumstances, with a very high rate of undesirable side-effects!
