AMR As Nightmare Bacteria

Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria documentary has had me paranoid. It’s scary to think foreign bacteria can enter your body and shut it down. The most informing information was the NDM-1 wasn’t a bacteria it was a resistance gene that can turn bacteria into superbugs. I do think antibiotics are being over used. I agree with M.D Arjun Srinivasan,” the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the environment, the more opportunities we create for these bacteria to become resistant”.

In the last decade, the number of prescriptions for antibiotics has increases. Even though, antibiotics are helpful, an excess amount of antibiotics can be dangerous. Quite often antibiotics are wrongly prescribed to cure viruses when they are meant to target bacteria. Antibiotics are a type of medicine that is prone to kill microorganisms, or bacteria. By examining the PBS documentary Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria and the article “U.S. government taps GlaxoSmithKline for New Antibiotics” by Ben Hirschler as well as a few other articles can help depict the problem that is of doctors prescribing antibiotics wrongly or excessively, which can led to becoming harmful to the body.

The superbug poses a huge threat to society in many ways and it raises many issues. How should the patient be handled? How many different types of antibiotics are too much for a person to retain? How can people living in poverty prevent the spread of bacteria? The rise of the superbug produces numerous questions surrounding the care of patients and the fast spread of the resistant bacteria. The way scientists and doctors treat and care for their patients should be top priority, but when the patient is either living in poverty or in an area with limited resources it becomes difficult. In many poor cultures the superbug is growing much faster because they don’t necessarily have the understanding to prevent the spread of bacteria. In places like India and Pakistan antibiotics can be bought readily at pharmacies without prescriptions. Because many people think antibiotics can cure anything they use them inappropriately, therefore creating an environment for the bacteria to grow resistant. This is a major issue in Southern Asia as the rise of superbugs is much faster here than other countries. Reasons for this include the ease of access to antibiotics, the method of isolation for patients with

At least two million people are infected with antibiotic resistant superbugs and at least 23,000 die from them.

Throughout my life, adults have insisted the use of antibiotics to fight against the most inconsequential illnesses, whether it’s the cold or the flu. However, neither illness is due to invasion of bacteria. This misuse can lead to antibiotic resistance, also known as antimicrobial resistance(AMR), currently one of the central issues facing the public health system. While the process for antibiotic resistance occurs naturally through the process of adaptation, the mismanagement of antibiotic resources has accelerated the rate at which the bacteria adapt. The occurrence of this misinformation isn’t limited to a few adults: even some of my peers suggest taking antibiotics when faced with the flu. This leads to asking whether AMR is truly a problem and are present regulations enough to combat the issue.

Antibiotics are inarguably one of the greatest advances in medical science of the past century. Although the first natural antibiotic Penicillin was not discovered until 1928 by Scottish biologist Alexander Flemming, evidence exists that certain plant and mold growths were used to treat infections in ancient Egypt, ancient India, and classical Greece (Forrest, 1982). In our modern world with the advent of synthetic chemistry synthetic antibiotics like Erithromycin and its derivative Azithromycin have been developed. Antibiotics have many uses including the treatment of bacterial and protozoan infection, in surgical operations and prophylactically to prevent the development of an infection. Through these applications, antibiotics have saved countless lives across the world and radically altered the field of medicine. Though a wonderful and potentially lifesaving tool, antibiotic use is not without its disadvantages. Mankind has perhaps been too lax in regulation and too liberal in application of antibiotics and growing antibiotic resistance is the price we must now pay. A recent study showed that perhaps 70% of bacterial infections acquired during hospital visits in the United States are resistant to at least one class of antibiotic (Leeb, 2004). Bacteria are not helpless and their genetic capabilities have allowed them to take advantage of society’s overuse of antibiotics, allowing them to develop

The problem is that antibiotics resistance has become a very big problem in todays society. Antibiotics are no longer effective against certain super-bugs such as MRSA.

While stewardship is extremely important to slow the rate of resistance, we must also make sure that patients in need of antimicrobial therapy receive the treatment they need. Price of medication and overly cautious prescribers are two of many barriers that patients may experience; as clinicians it’s important that we do our part to promote appropriate and affordable treatments. Ideally, prescribers could determine the exact pathogen using a swab or culture of the infected tissue. This would prevent misdiagnoses and reduce unnecessary costs to the

Antibiotics, composed of microorganisms such as streptomycin and penicillin, kill other infectious microorganisms in the human body. At one point, antibiotics were considered to have “basically wiped out infection in the United States”, but due to their overuse and evolutionary

The second installment of the video series “Rx for Survival,” concerned itself with implications pertaining to bacteria that have become antibiotic-resistant and was titled “Rise of the Superbugs.” The video presented the cases of individuals who were afflicted with maladies resulting from bacterial infections that were not being impeded by the normative pharmaceutical care that we have used for many decades and take for granted.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) has recently noted several model antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains with redesigned capabilities in pathogenesis, transmission and resistance. These several strains, Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter species, have been given the acronym-based title of the ESKAPE Pathogens. These strains of bacteria compromise one of the biggest threats faced by physicians today not because of the infectious and devastating illnesses they lead to, but because of their ability to resist antibiotics in the healthcare setting. Failure for industries, academia and government to cooperate and develop research/development operations has left healthcare providers one-step behind in the fight against these new brands of infectious diseases. A lack of research/development operations has left the healthcare industry with antiquated antibiotics no longer capable of targeting and eradicating these microorganisms in human systems.

Colistin is the antibiotic that doctors use as a last resort to wipe out dangerous bacteria, like Escherichia coli. However, resent finding suggests that colistin is no longer effective against E. coli. For that reason, antibiotic recent bacteria have been found in pigs, pork and people in China, last November. The researchers found that bacteria had developed a new gene, mcr-1, that will no longer be killed by the most effective and toxic antibiotics in existence. Mcr-1 gene jumps from cell to cell, strain from strain and between different species of bacteria, allowing resistance to antibiotics. Dr. Yohei Doi , an expert on antimicrobial resistant, declares that the overuse of antibiotics in both agriculture and medicine can lead to a future

The development of antibiotics was an important advancement in 20th century medicine. Previously deadly infectious diseases are now routinely treated with antibiotics. Moreover, for modern-day medical procedures such as chemotherapy treatment to be successful, antibiotic use is necessary. For these reasons, the prospect of bacteria developing widespread resistance to antibiotics is a major concern as it would render many modern-day medical therapies unviable.

According the World Health Organization (WHO), antibiotic resistance is one of the world’s greatest health threats to date (Haddox, 2013). In the article, The Health Threat of Antibiotic Resistance, Gail Haddox (2013) discusses the danger antibiotic resistance poses in today’s society and strategies to prevent the expansion of antibiotic resistance. In Europe alone, an estimated 25,000 deaths have been attributed to multi-resistant infections (Haddox, 2013). Common infections are now harder to treat due to the increased resistance to antibiotics across the world, in fact some are becoming untreatable. Antibiotics should be treated like oil, a non-renewable resource (Haddox, 2013).

The overuse of antibiotics has been a problem for well over a decade. This misuse leads to many nonvisible problems arising within the human population. As the use of antibiotics increases, the number of antibiotic resistant bacteria also increases. When bacteria become resistant to an antibiotic, another antibiotic must be used to try and kill it and the cycle becomes vicious. Michael Martin, Sapna Thottathil, and Thomas Newman stated that antimicrobial resistance is, “an increasingly serious threat to global public health that requires action across all government sectors and society” (2409).