Antimicrobial Coatings And Its Effects On The Environment

Scientists have proved a direct relationship between antibiotic dosage and the emergence and spread of drug-resistant bacteria. Firstly, the overuse of antibiotics clearly drives the evolution of resistance. In many countries where antibiotics are unregulated and can be bought without a prescription. The lack of regulation leads to antibiotics being easily available, plentiful and cheap, which results in overuse. With the emergence of online shopping, people in countries where antibiotics are regulated also can get antibiotics from foreign countries. Secondly, incorrectly prescribed antibiotics also contribute to the promotion of resistant bacteria. Up to half of antibiotics used in humans are unnecessary and inappropriate. For example, a third of people believe that antibiotics are effective for the common cold, and the common cold is the most common reason

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.

Bacteria are not just all of a sudden becoming resistant to antibiotics they have always had a bit of resilence, as a human species we have always developed something it doesn’t work we will develop something stronger, that has been the downfall in this instance. Pencillan is a great example as it is one of the most highly used antibiotic and is derived and made from mold.

Antibiotic use in animals has recently captured the attention of various professionals as the blatant, adverse effects have become increasingly prevalent. Agricultural manufacturers carelessly inject livestock with antibiotics in order to maximize their weight gain by minimizing the amount of energy consumed in fighting illnesses. This broad use of antibiotics in food-producing animals has contributed to the emergence and distribution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, resulting in either mild or fatal illnesses. To put the severity of this issue in perspective, legislators must realize that 1 in 5 antibiotic-resistant infections are caused by bacteria from food and animals. Although antibiotic use in animals is not the sole culprit of the

In 2011, the United States sold 29.9 million pounds of antibiotics for meat and poultry production use. but only 7.7 million pounds for human use. Antibiotics are used in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) to kill bacteria that lives among the animals to keep them healthy until slaughter. They come with many side effects which end up harming the consumer, the animal's life becomes shortened because of the antibiotics speeding up the growth and the long term effects on the earth could end up costing us lots of money. Even though antibiotics keep the animal healthy, the usage in livestock should be banned because it causes a health threat to the consumer and creates antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Antibiotic resistance is when microorganisms, such as bacteria, are able to survive an exposure to antibiotics and these bacteria are now resistant to the effects of these antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance in bacteria has been an issue since antibiotics were discovered. The fact that bacteria can become resistant to our medical treatments such as antibiotics is a natural evolutionary process, but there are certain human contributions that definitely speed up the process. For example, one of the main contributions that will be discussed is the problem of over prescription of the antibiotic drugs. The

Possible solutions for resistance in the future are to find new antibiotics in niches besides soil, such as the marine environment as globalization and deforestation make new soil discoveries harder each day. Educating people about resistance to prevent misuse is important as well because not everybody knows about the growing resistance problem. If people know about the resistance problem, proper use of antibiotics would increase. Antibiotics today are easily accessible without the need of prescription in most cases, leading to the wrong self-diagnosis based on observation instead of actual tests. Creating more regulations to ensure prescriptions and correct diagnosis will help with the misuse of antibiotics. Stopping their use as growth hormones in agriculture will also help because the antibiotics from the plants and animals are able to unnecessarily get into a person’s body, which promotes more antibiotic resistance since the dosages are not consistent. As the antibiotics pass through the livestock and people, they contaminate the water system. The antibiotic resistance today does not necessarily mean the end of antibiotics as long as

And in the European Union in the 1990s, 5 million kg of antibiotics has been reported in total, but only 3.5 million kg were used for therapeutic purposes (Boxall et al., 2000). In China, antibiotics have been widely used in livestock industries since the early 1990s. The annual total usage of veterinary antibiotics has reached approximately 6000 tons, most of which happens in the economically developed regions (Hou, 2003).

Widespread use of antibiotics has been very controversial in the media as well in the general population. Due to these controversies, it is very misunderstood to how antibiotics work leading to many patients in the hospital setting wanting to take them when it is not necessary or refusing to take when it is necessary for their survival. Some of this controversy is due to antibiotic resistance, which has spread an alarming rate in the 21st century (Walsh, 2000). Antibiotic resistance is the result of very strong bacteria or microbes that are resistant to the antibiotic prescribed and those microbes accumulate overtime by their survival, reproduction and transfer, leading to increased levels of antibiotic resistance.

In order to control the growth and spread of harmful microbes that can cause disease, we use antimicrobial agent. Disinfectants are antimicrobial agents that are use in a physical process or used in a form of a chemical agent. Disinfectants are used to destroy vegetative pathogen but are not effective against bacterial endospores. Disinfectants remove harmful products of toxins from material and usually are used on inanimate objects since they can be harmful to human tissues. Another antimicrobial agent used is, antibiotics. Antibiotics are usually prescribed to a person to cure a bacterial or viral infection. Antibiotics are used to inhibit the growth of infectious agents in the human body. The disk diffusion test known as the Kirby-Bauer

Staphylococcus epidermidis is a facultative anaerobic bacterium. It is part of the normal human flora and is found on the skin. Colonies of these bacteria can produce a protective slime called a hydrophobic biofilm. Staphylococcus epidermidis is usually not pathogenic unless it enters the human body. One of the most common places for infections are hospitals where people often have weakened immune systems, open wounds or medical devices implanted in their bodies. Staphylococcus epidermidis can be fatal because of the protective biofilm and the bacteria’s resistance to common antibiotics makes the infection difficult to treat. This stresses the

According to previous, excessive use of antibiotics is one of the causes of drug resistance in different pathogens, this concern has caused many hospitals around the world develop guidelines and strategies to use appropriate antibiotics and are committed themselves to

The phenomenon of antibiotic resistance occurs when bacterial organisms can resist – via several different avenues – the harmful effects of antibiotic drugs, which ultimately results in a selective advantage that is not shared amongst the remainder of the population that is still susceptible to the effects of the drugs. There are numerous ways that bacteria are known to show resistance to antibiotics. Some bacteria can modify the chemical nature of the drug, making it ineffective, and yet some possess a different form of target site that the drug is not compatible with, which inhibits the drug’s ability to bind to the bacterial cell. When coupled with prevalent antibiotic use amongst human populations, these acquired mechanisms of resistance can be selectively advantageous to the bacteria in possession of them. Being resistant to one or more antibiotic drugs means that these bacteria can survive and pass on their genes for resistance to their offspring, which can have negative effects on human populations, especially in the healthcare setting. Antibiotic resistance has garnered much attention in recent years across the developed world, as pathogenic microbes become resistant to more and more antibiotics thanks to both the overuse and misuse of these drugs. The increased frequency of which this problem has

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).

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).