Arguments Against Superbugs

Amidst the futile clamor and commotion of national healthcare reform legislation debated on the national political stage, everyone in the medical industry from patients to doctors alike are searching for ways to effectively and efficiently trim the cost of delivering quality healthcare. While the inexcusable waste and graft of the insurance industry, runaway medical malpractice litigation and the importance of lifelong preventative care are all issues that have been thrust to the forefront of the political discourse, a tremendous leak in the system has escaped notice and continues to drain resources from both hospitals and those they treat. The threat of additional infections afflicting a patient who requires treatment for an original condition is prevalent throughout American hospitals, and according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services "Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs)" or "infections that patients acquire while receiving treatment for medical or surgical conditions "¦ occur in all settings of care, including hospital acute care units and same day surgical centers, ambulatory outpatient care clinics, and long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes and rehabilitation centers" (HHS Action Plan, 2011). Whether one attempts to gauge the overall price of healthcare-associated infections in terms of the financial expenditure, the human suffering or the diversion of valuable resources they impose on the healthcare system, it is quite clear that these

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 17 April 2015, para. 7). If your doctor has ever given, or will give you antibiotics, the misuse, the wrong dosage, and even the wrongful prescription of antibiotics, such as for a virus, can eventually contribute to making a superbug, again according to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 February 2017, para. 2-5). There are already many instances of superbugs taking people’s lives. For example, just this January 2017, the CDC reported that a Washoe County resident in Reno, Nevada died in late September 2016 because she had an infection from a superbug that could not be cured by every available antibiotic in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 August 2017, para. 1-5). Posted on the Infectious Diseases Society of America website in 2007 by her mother was the story of how Rebecca Lohsen, a 17-year-old high school student and swimmer from New Jersey, died from an MRSA infection, an infection resulting from a superbug (Infectious Diseases Society of America, September 2007, para. 1). On that same website, posted by her parents, a 19-year-old college student, Meredith LittleJohn, died to a superbug after spending time in an intensive care unit in a hospital (Infectious Diseases Society of America, n.d., para. 1-3). And the list of those affected goes way on. So as we can see, superbugs are definitely a threatening and real issue that can affect almost anyone.

Finally, the increase cost of drugs from pharmaceutical companies are have contributed to the ongoing cost in health care for which the increase in medical technologies are attributed towards. “J.D.Kleinke (2016) reports this medical progress is expensive. In numerous therapeutic areas, better medicines increase costs, at least in the short run; in other areas, better medicines that reduce costs in the short run add costs in the long run. Burton Weisbrod and Craig LaMay summarize this overarching impact of innovation in their observation that “the use of antibiotics to prevent deaths from infections can cause people to live longer and hence to die from heart disease and cancer, which typically entail even greater costs.” Break through drugs

While antibiotics and vaccines have numerous well-known benefits associated with prevention and recovery, what unfamiliar beneficial effects do they contribute to society? When it comes to the topic of antibiotic and vaccine use, most people will readily agree that medical treatment will greatly reduce the chance of getting ill and will improve recovery time. This agreement usually ends, however, on the question: Are antibiotics and vaccines necessary to maintain a healthy society? Whereas some are convinced that the use of antibiotics and vaccines pose a threat to society by inducing antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and encouraging virus mutation, others maintain that resistance and mutation will occur naturally, and without advances in treatment these natural changes of pathogens are the cause of devastating epidemics.

(2010) found that the treatment expenses related to methicillin resistance Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection were significantly higher than those related to methicillin susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) infection. For instance, they found that the average 6-month unadjusted costs for patients who had MRSA infection were $34,657, while the unadjusted costs for patients who had MSSA infection were $15,923. The expected reason for this matter is that patients infected with resistant infections might pay more extended hospital stays, laboratory tests, imaging tests, and for their expensive antibiotics such as intravenous antibiotics. Also, MRSA infection is more likely to infect blood stream and lungs, which is very dangerous and need extensive and expensive therapy. This financial burden might be very overwhelming for patients living in Low and/or Middle Income Countries (LMICs) and with low health insurance coverage and high out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditure. Knowing the overwhelming economic impact of antibiotic resistance is very important for policy makers and other stakeholders because they can develop strategies that reduce antibiotic resistance and therefore minimize the financial expenses of the

Owing to doctor’s fear of inadequate treatment, they tend to prescribe multiple dosages in order to save their selves from termination due to ignorance from treating an infection. However, the public is equally at fault since they terminate their course of antibiotic treatment before their course end. Due to individuals’ perception that antibiotics are unnecessary now, antibiotics disengage in destroying bacteria rapidly, which provides enough time for bacteria to begin to resist antibiotics (Aziz 1073). Although limiting antibiotic use in patients may not directly benefit the patient, it benefits the whole society by preventing the development of resistant strains (Aiello et al. 1914). As well, hospital managers and public healthcare are at fault since they tend to focus on different objectives to secure patient health by using cost effective measures to preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics in order to avoid low revenue (Kaier et al. 494). Therefore, in order to reduce consumption while still allowing access is by realigning their financial incentives and prescription by health care

The issue of superbugs can bring up immediate issues in hospitals all over the country. Whenever a patient enters a hospital or is brought into an ambulance they are usually administered a dosage of antibiotics in order to help the immune system fight off the illnesses. As patients continue to bring in bacteria which are resistant to the potency of antibacterial agents then essentially doctors would be administering medication that would not be helping their patients. Doctors take an oath to save lives no matter what it takes and that moral view can be potentially dangerous in a hospital setting. Patients that bring in supper bacteria can eventually cause other patients in the hospital to catch the super bugs. This can lead to an epidemic where

resistant infections is estimated to be as high as $20 billion in direct costs, and more than $35

In the past, most infections could be treated with simple antibiotics, leading to a higher chance of recovery and increased rate of survival. Now, infections are more severe and take too many lives, something that is easily avoidable by not permitting the bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. Another problem the world faces is that medication is not being developed quickly enough to fight antibiotic-resistant strains. According to Spellberg et al., “antibiotic development has slowed dramatically over the past 25 years” (2008, para. 13). Without the ability to develop new drugs to counteract current antibiotic-resistant bacteria, more serious strains and increased rates of infection result. This makes the simplest, most cost effective form of bacterial treatment obsolete. As a result of antibiotic-resistant bacteria multiplying quickly, this will no doubt increase the number of deaths due to infection, increase pressure for new medicine, and no doubt increase health care costs.

Infection is a major cause of human suffering. Even relatively minor infections can become more serious, leading to major infection and can, in some cases, lead to patient death. In addition to patient suffering, infection causes distress to family and friends.The costs to the health care system of providing care for those with infections are huge. In addition to concerns over the growing costs to health care, the use of antibiotics to treat these infections is thought to

As the shortages rise and bacteria continues to increase, the infectious diseases begin to affect patient care. There had been said that numbers of drugs that were being used to treat severe infections were no longer available. Although there are new antibiotics created on a monthly basis but testing and discovering workable antibiotics take an extensive about of time and money, according to World Health Organization the article states

Recently, numerous varieties of bacteria causing especially difficult-to-remedy infections have risen to prominence in not only the general community, but also, and more noteworthily, in various healthcare facilities. These bacteria, also known as “superbugs”, are all characterized by not only their potential to cause severe, demonstrably lethal disease, with tens of thousands of the more than two million people in the United States developing infections characterized by drug/antibiotic resistance dying from them annually (Maron, 2013), but also their methods of evolution, namely all manifestations of a process known as horizontal transfer. Their strength mainly results from natural selection, coupled with antibiotic resistance, which in turn is obtained from misuse of the antimicrobial medicine. Additionally, the government is currently not regulating the usage or prescription of antibiotics, and is not expressing nearly the same concern towards this public health matter than towards such diseases as cancer or AIDS, which may eventually be curable through improved medical technology, cannot evolve to become more untreatable as with the superbugs, and do not necessarily come about as a direct result of medicinal abuse. Indeed, the situation is urgent, with the CDC-described “nightmare” bacteria rapidly pervading the entirety of the world ever since half of a century prior. The government

The problem of antibiotic resistance has been a growing concern as years pass, and has become one of the world’s most pressing health concerns. Antibiotics are substances of medicinal purposes that inhibit the growth of bacteria like tuberculosis and malaria. Antibiotics are used to prevent infections of possibly fatal diseases. The resistance to an antibiotic occurs when a bacterium changes in a way that makes an antibiotic ineffective against a targeted bacterium. There are many causes of antibiotic resistance, some due to prescription methods and some due to evolution. The man who invented penicillin predicted the future resistance to antibiotics, saying, “There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant” (Fleming, 1945).

“A century ago, the top three causes of death were infectious diseases. More than half of all people dying in the United States died because of germs. Today, they account for a few percent of deaths at most. We owe much of that, of course, to antibiotics,” states Aaron Carroll a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine (Carroll). Now, once easily treated bacterial infections are increasingly difficult to treat and rid from a patient’s system because antibiotics can no longer effectively treat some common diseases. Antibiotics are overused and overprescribed; medical professionals use antibiotics to treat viral infections when they are intended for bacterial infections only. With consistent overuse, antibiotic

The antibiotic resistance crisis will cause a lot of issues with human development and the health of humanity, to where 80,000 people can die from a single antimicrobial resistance outbreak (3). The reason why this crisis is a