Antimicrobial Resistance : Antibacterial Resistance

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

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.

Antibiotic-resistant microbes infect more than two million Americans and kill over 100,000 each year. These numbers will continue to grow unless we make a drastic effort to curtail them. The necessary response is threefold and includes legislation, awareness, and activism. I will address all of these.

The war against bacteria and their ability to evolve at a much faster rate than humans can create antibiotics (a medicine that hinders and disrupts bacterial growth and or destroys it) to fight against them has the human race at a disadvantage. With more and more bacteria being found to have strains of drug-resistant chains is creating a health crisis around the world as global health officials try to find a way to protect their populations against this up and coming threat, and the issues it poses for the future of medicine and treatment of infections. Due to increased use of antibiotics in unneeded situations, bacteria are having more chances to let mutations that are immune to antibiotics be spread through other bacteria. This is causing more cases of antibiotic resistant bacteria and increasing the number of them. Drug resistance results in higher costs due to longer hospital pays and more expensive antibiotics, need for supervision, patient education, and new drug developments.

Millions of lives are saved every single day because of antibiotics treating common infections, allowing organ transplants, as well extending the average lifespan by decades. About half of the emergency cases treated in the intensive care units in the video “Antibiotic Resistance—Catalyst” are suffering from bacterial infections as well as coming to terms that it is no longer treatable, because bacteria are rapidly becoming resistant to all the antibiotics we have. By overusing this incalculable medical resource, we are basically risking the loss the potency of antibiotics, which is a threat to the human race.

Antimicrobial agents represent one of the main therapeutic tools both in human and veterinary medicine to control and treat a variety of bacterial infectious diseases. Despite an increasing prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, the health and economic impact of colonization and infection with these organisms has not been fully elucidated. Antimicrobial are substances capable of killing or slowing the growth of microbes such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites. EMR develops when the microbes change in some way so that the antimicrobial used to treat them become less effective and sometimes it doesn't work at all. Antimicrobial are used in several ways. In humans they are used to prevent control and treat infections. In agriculture, they work to treat control or

When assumed that a patient carries a highly infectious pathogen it is important for health care settings to take high safety measures to reduce the amount of anti-bacterial resistance. A highly infectious disease is one which can be transmitted via contact or droplet, making the infection more transmittable. Antibiotic resistance infected people are classed under high risked individuals because this is when the effectiveness of a treatment is reduced and therefore the patient with the infection must stay in hospital for a longer period of time or may even end up with a chronic disease (Betterhealth.vic.gov.au 2015). An economic strain is put on the health care system due to the increased cost in treating the resistant infection and the use of health care facilities. A study which examined 188 people who were suffering from Antibiotic resistant infections were estimated in 2008 to cost around $13.35 and $18.75 million dollars(8.63-12.12millionGBP) in only one health care institution (Frieden

Antibiotic resistance occurs due to the strong selection pressure that antibiotics impose on a bacterium community. Most bacteria are affected by the antibiotic and are killed, but at times, a mutation occurs in an individual that leads to a resistant bacterium. This resistant strain can then spread rapidly due to the lack of competing bacteria (Yurchenko, 2018). This resistance is more likely to occur from the overuse of antibiotics; therefore, it has been a point of emphasis to use antibiotics only when necessary and not

Antibiotics have been an important instrument in public health since 1928, saving the lives of people around the world. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2015), about half of antibiotics used in human and animals are unnecessarily and inappropriately prescribed, leading to the emergence of drug resistance in bacteria (CDC, 2015). The CDC estimates that drug-resistant bacteria cause two million illnesses and approximately 23,000 deaths each year in the United States alone (2015).

Antibiotic resistance had been a crisis in the United States for many years now. According to the CDC, “up to 50% of the time, antibiotics are not optimally prescribed, often done so when not needed, [or with] incorrect dosing or duration” (CDC). More and more bacteria are becoming antibiotic resistant mostly due to incorrect amount and length of dosage, while sometimes, even the actual antibiotic is incorrectly given to the patient. Because of this, many strains of bacteria had become resistant to these antibiotics and thus, have infected more and more

Antibiotic resistance has evolved as a result of the interactions between bacteria and antibiotic after an antibiotic exposure. Bacterial species are capable of adapting to new antibiotic as simply as they adapt to new environments due to their amazing genomic plasticity. This in turn results antibiotic resistance to be very dynamic and unpredictable. “Every year, almost 100,000 Americans die from antibiotic-resistant infections acquired from hospitals, largely because of the reduced effectiveness of existing drugs, due to the development and propagation of drug resistance

According to Hoffman and Outterson, the most deadly aspect to antibiotic resistance or ABR is when a patient at a hospital developing a strain of a disease that is completely untreatable and lethal (6). In response to the overabundance of antibiotic use, many scientists believe that having a stricter infection management system will help control the overuse of antibiotics. The main reasoning for stricter control is to help prevent bacteria from having the chance to evolve in the the first place. Hoffman and Outterson believe that the best approach to finding a solution is to have a collaboration of people from a variety of academic and professional jobs (6). With this collaboration of people, Hoffman and Outterson, devised a three step approach to conquering ABR; this approach is Access, Conservation, and Innovation (6). The absence of access is a common cause of death by resistant bacteria; scientists need to be given access to existing antibiotics so that they can devise possible solutions to ABR (6). Conservation will neither prevent ABR nor cure it, but it will help slow down the spread of it; the third and final step is innovation (Hoffman and Outterson 6). Innovation as stated by Hoffman and Outterson is the creation of new drugs and others ideas to fight off the evolved bacteria (6). Hopefully with these new ideas, the world will work together to solve this crisis. If we do not find a solution, I fear for our

The development of antibiotic resistant strains are on the rise especially in developing countries and are creating a crisis in the effective treatment of infections.1,5

AMR is one of our most serious health threats. Infections from resistant bacteria are now too common and some pathogens have even become more resistant to multiple types/ classes of antibiotics. The loss of effective antibiotics will undermine our ability to fight infectious diseases and manage the infection complications

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).