What do you believe is the single most important factor driving up the cost of living in Nigeria?

Imagine a country with a billion people, where every individual has different interests and different goals. You will never know their interests and goals until you ask them, but asking a billion people is not an easy task.

This is the same complex scenario that scientists face when we study bacteria. There are about a billion of them in a colony the size of the tip of a pencil, but when we look at the whole colony of bacteria, they all look the same and we assume that they will all fall victim to the same antibiotic. Not so, unfortunately.

Just like people, every single bacterium in a wound has its own goal. Some will thrive and multiply, others will migrate to other parts of the patient's body, some will succumb to antibiotic treatment, and a few will lie low and go unnoticed.

These last ones are the troublemakers, because they are both able to survive antibiotics, and they are not detected by diagnostic antibiotic resistance testing. Finding these low-lying troublemakers among hundreds of billions of bacteria is like finding a needle in a haystack. They are very difficult to find, but they can render medical treatment useless.

"We know that these troublemakers, the needles in the haystack, exist because every now and then somebody jumps into the haystack and gets hurt by it. We also know that in some chronic bacterial infections, the haystack contains more than one needle," says the senior researcher of a recent study on the problem, associate professor Christian Lentz.

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