Antibiotic Resistance
When the penicillin drug was first introduced during the height of World War II, it was hailed to be a medical miracle, with its ability to rapidly vanquish the most dreadful all time killer of that time – infected wounds. Although it was initially discovered by a certain French medical student named Ernest Duchesne way back in 1896, it was only in 1928 that the Scottish physician by the name Alexander Fleming that the true potential of the product was fully discovered. Drug manufacturers immediately began mass-producing penicillin all over the world but just after four years of distribution, microbes that have developed resistance to the drug started appearing.
The very first bug that displayed antibiotic resistance is the Staphylococcus Aureus bug, although it doesn’t cause the body any serious harm, it has been known to cause pneumonia and toxic shock syndrome. Soon after, other types of antibiotic resistant bacteria were recorded such as the Streptococcus Pneumoniae and the form of penicillin resistant gonorrhea that was contracted by American military personnel who from Southeast Asian prostitutes in 1967. And since then, antibiotic resistance have spread widely and rapidly, causing alarm and panic to many people and medial practitioners who are frantically looking for a way to stop this medical crisis.
The question is: How did this phenomenon of antibiotic resistance come about? Medical experts claim that this was largely due to the general complacency of drug manufacturers in 1980, largely promoting the misguided perception that humanity has fully outsmarted the problem with bacteria-related infections. Many manufacturers failed to have the foresight to work on newer agents and weren’t able to recognize that there was an all too real possibility in the increase antibiotic resistance mainly due to overuse of the antibiotics. And hence, it was in 1990 that the human race has come to face the grim reality that there are certain infections that don’t have any drug agents available to present cure.
Many experts claim that the increased prevalence of bacteria resistant to antibiotic is actually a result of evolution. Like any population of organisms in this planet, bacteria have many variants that have unusual traits, and in this case, such trait includes the ability to withstand any antibiotic attack. So when an afflicted person takes antibiotic, the drug will be able to kill the defenseless bacteria, while leaving behind the ones that are resistant to it. Quite renegade bacteria will son multiply and increase a million times every single day. Technically, the antibiotic does not cause this resistance, but it allows it by effectively creating an environment or situation that makes the existing variant to flourish unchecked.
Although antibiotic resistance is considered to be inevitable, there are certain measures than can be taken to slow it down. Many efforts are underway on improving the control over infection, developing new types of antibiotics and educating people of the proper use of the drugs. Currently, the FDA is using all its efforts to speed up the development as well as the availability of new antibiotic drugs. For patients, it is important to avoid all forms of self-medication and seek professional advice before taking any form of antibiotics. You may need a certain dosage and the required length of time that the medicine should be taken. The problem with some people is the fact that if they think they are all well, they abruptly stop their antibiotic intake too soon, easily encouraging the growth and resistance of bacteria instead and unwittingly promoting adverse effect. So even if antibiotics are generally harmless drugs to take, it should only be given under strict medical instructions, or suffer the harsh consequences.