How Do Antibiotics Affect The Human Body

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.

Children are among the most vulnerable segment of the health care population. They rely on the good judgment and the care of adults to guide them to the best and safest possible treatments. Part of our responsibility, as adults, is to inform ourselves so that we can participate in a constructive way in that equation.

The dangers and possible harmful effects that these medications hold for a young child will not help the parents feel too convinced about the usage of medication. As stated in Time this month, “We know that kids are not just little adults, they metabolize medications differently” (Kluger, et al). Parents might feel scared or reluctant to administer medication after hearing assertions about the dangers. Parents worry enough about their kids everyday without the use of a strong medication. The tendency to assume that doctors fear the usage of medication in children is overwhelming. It is more than clear to see why parents, or anyone affected by this disorder

"Children, young people, their parents or legal guardians, and health care professionals in all settings make decisions about medicines based on sound information about risk and benefit. They have access to safe and effective medicines that are prescribed on the basis of the best available evidence" (Caldwell, 2013).

The most frequently reason for prescription of antibiotics was abscesses, 170/464 (37%). The most widely used NSAIDs were Par¬acetamol (Acetaminophen), resulting in 270/464 responses (58.2%). The most commonly prescribed antibioticswas Amoxicillin (n = 344, 74.1%). Only 4.4(8.8%) of the participants followed the WHO guide for good prescription. Female students showed significantly more errors than their male counterparts regarding the dose and drug’s brand name; p=0.002,p= 0.030, respectively. There was a significant reduction in prescription errors with the increase of the students’ educational level (p=0.001), and students from public universities showed more errors in knowing brand names and duration of treatment comparing to those from private universities

to unnecessarily overprescribe medications to their pediatric patients. Of these prescription drugs, opioid pain killers, antibiotics, and psychiatric medications are the most commonly overprescribed in child care. For example, opioid prescriptions have increased 300 percent in the past seventeen years (Boerner 20), over 50 million unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions are written each year (Murray 266), and 6.4 million psychiatric prescriptions are given to children between the ages of four and seventeen each year (Johnson 19). The overprescribing of these medications leads to children experiencing unnecessary side effects, increases the chances of addictions, and encourages drug resistance. In this essay, I will be proposing that there should be a (i) government enforced set of extensive regulations and checklists that each patient must fulfill before receiving a prescription and (ii) governmental laws prohibiting careless prescribing by doctors and hold doctors more accountable for the prescriptions they write.

A couple times a year local and national mass media put the spotlight on problems connected to antibiotic overuse. Some people consider those problems to be real and serious, and others think that the discussed topics are nothing more than new “fashionable” subjects to talk about, distracting people from “real” problems, such as climbing gas prices or war expenses. Meanwhile, antibiotic overuse continues as a common practice among US doctors and agribusinesses for the last 20 years. The practice of antibiotic overuse has put patient’s health at risk, contributed to antibiotic resistance and increased bacterial mutation to a new, stronger level; as well as it hitting the economy with new costly expenses in health care. It is time to stop

The confusion begins with the public, and their views on the topic. The research into public perception of antibiotics has occurred multiple times, each leading to a similar conclusion: the lack of awareness leads to false perceptions about the effects of antibiotics. Per the World Health Organization (WHO), surveying 10,000 people, 64% of individuals who responded believed that antibiotics could treat the flu and the cold. This is especially odd since the same percentage of people believed that AMR “is an issue that could affect them and their families” (World Health Organization). Due to the constant confusion, about if

Upper respiratory tract infections (URTI), including acute otitis media (AOM) are the most common cause of ambulatory physician visits and antimicrobial prescriptions in children1,2. The most common bacterial causes of URTI are Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae, though the majority of cases are caused by viral pathogens 3–10. Distinguishing between viral and bacterial URTI can be difficult. Reports on quality of antimicrobial prescriptions have shown a 30-50% of all out-patient prescriptions due to (upper) respiratory tract infections to be inappropriate2,10,11. In Europe the quality of prescription is higher in the north of the continent, including Iceland compared to in the south12. Conversely, many factors contribute to the overuse of antimicrobials2,13–15, which in turn results to increase in antimicrobial resistance16,17. Contributing factors cited by by physicians to cause over-prescription include uncertainty of diagnosis, fear of disease complications, lack of perception of harmful effects of antimicrobials, not perceiving their own prescription practices to be a problem, pressure by patients, limited time, fear of damaging doctor-patient relationship in addition to language, cultural and educational barriers2,13–15. Antimicrobials were long a mainstay treatment against AOM in fear of rare, but dangerous complications, which have later been found to be unfounded, asnd

Research has revealed how overprescribing antibiotic creates several adverse outcomes, including the development of multidrug resistant organisms, Clostridium difficile infection, and increased costs of health care (Myung et al., 2015). The Consumer Report (2015) raised concern for the overuse of antibiotics and how it leads to the loss of the ability to treat serious infections. Doctors,

Antibiotic resistance is becoming a more prevalent issue. This is a growing dilemma because, not only do patients have the potential to develop resistance, but they also can transmit the resistant bacteria to others (McKellar, 2014). Additionally, it is estimated that over one-third of all antibiotics prescribed to patients are unnecessary (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016). Overutilization of antibiotics is a growing problem due to some patients’ inappropriate demands for antibiotics or misdiagnoses by prescribers, however, underutilization of antibiotics can be just as problematic. Physicians are trained to use good antimicrobial stewardship when prescribing antibiotics; only giving them to patients who truly do have a bacterial infection. This becomes an issue when providers are too cautious and do not prescribe antibiotics in an attempt not to contribute to antibiotic resistance. Unfortunately, this caution could have a detrimental effect on the health of patients who actually need the antibiotics. To combat this issue, we must find a balance between good antimicrobial stewardship to minimize resistance while also taking underutilization into consideration. We, as pharmacists, are at a unique position between the physician and

Antibiotics-resistant organisms have become one of the most serious threats to public health, infecting over two million people and killing approximately 23,000 people annually.1 According to the CDC, “total inappropriate antibiotic use,” such as prescribing unnecessary antibiotics or giving the wrong dose or duration, makes up to 50% of all outpatient antibiotic use,2,3 and in 2009, the United States spent $10.7 billion on antibiotics, indicating that there is a lot of potential money to save.4

How would you encourage parents with children to approach a health professional about over prescribing antibiotics that could potential lead to resistance? How would you educate parents to recognize warning flags with over prescribing habits? You state that health education programs need to have the ability to enable and empower parents, how could empower lead to further complications associated with antibiotics? In your opinion what is a approach that could be taken to encourage health professional to reduce prescribing habits while still empowering parents to have guidance and ownership over their families health status?

Summary: The article “Kids’ Drug- Resistant Bacteria Blamed on Farm Antibiotic Use” states that kid’s health is suffering from an antibiotic that is use in farm animals. Kids are infected by bacteria and treatment is difficult with the antibiotics that used in farm animals. If human get infected by this bacteria, antibiotics is not going to work while treatment because bacteria became more advance and that antibiotic is not going to work. Kids can expose to drug resistant bacteria in different way. Children can get infected by these bacteria by contact with animals which is infected by these bacteria and by eating food that is contaminated by bacteria. Most of the time people who get infected by these bacteria don’t get ill if they get ill

Antibiotics are derived from microbes that work by inhibiting the growth or by killing other bacteria (Tortora, Funke, and Case 549). Usually our body’s immune system is an ample defense by stopping microbes from replicating or killing them. However, sometimes the body can become overwhelmed and that is when antibiotics are used to help out our immune systems. An important dilemma in medicine is the increasing occurrence of antibiotic resistance, which occurs when bacteria are exposed to the same antibiotics over and over and eventually makes them less effective (Tortora, Funke, and Case 549). Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are bacteria that are not killed by common antibiotics (“Antibiotics”, 2007, para.6). There are several ways bacteria can develop antibiotic resistance: by altering of the drug target, altering membrane permeability, by developing enzymes that can inactivate the drug, developing alternate synthetic pathways, or acquire resistance by exposure to microbe with resistance genes. This spreading of genes is the result of plasmids that transfer R factors which contain two groups of genes: a resistance transfer factor and the r-determinant, which has the resistance genes (Tortora, Funke, and Case 232). R factors can be a problem in the healthcare field because of the misuse of antibiotics. This leads to preferential selection of bacteria that have R factors and results in populations of resistant bacteria growing larger and larger (Tortora, Funke,