Modern Medicine Must Not Be Possible Without The Discovery Of Antibiotics

Antibiotics have always been one of the most reliable drugs in medical history, making them a saving grace for those who suffer from bacterial caused illnesses. Although many types of drugs are used to cure diseases, are antibiotics actually capable of completely “curing” a patient? Many people find antibiotics to be a reliable source when it comes to fighting of an infection, however, when someone either overuses or misuses the prescription of antibiotics, harsh side effects may occur. One of the main problems that comes with the abuse of antibiotics being the resistance of them for future use. This becomes a major problem when further down the road a severe illness is accumulated by someone, but cannot be treated due to the resistance.

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

With all of our modern advances, it seems somewhat strange that chronic health problems have become so commonplace. When antibiotics were discovered, they predicted the end of disease. Instead, we now have a world full of frightening antibiotic resistant infections.

Antibiotics have played an essential role in the fight against diseases and infections since the 1940’s. Antibiotics are a leading cause for the rise of global average life expectancy in the 20th and 21st century. They have greatly reduced illnesses and deaths due to diseases. With the introductions of antibiotics in the 1940’s, like penicillin into clinical practice, formally deadly illnesses became immediately curable and saved thousands of lives (Yim 2006). Antibiotic use has been beneficial and when prescribed and taken correctly their effects on patients are exceedingly valuable. However, because these drugs have been used so widely and for such a long period of time the bacteria that the antibiotics are designed to kill have adapted,

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.

Dr. Martin Blaser, author of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues, paints antibiotics as a negative force in the world that causes disease. Dr. Blaser has studied the role of bacteria in human disease for more than thirty years at Vanderbilt University, and has experience as the director of the Human Microbiome Project at New York University. He also works with the National Institute of Health on infectious diseases. Meanwhile, Dr. David Shlaes, author of Antibiotics: The Perfect Storm, focuses on the drugs’ ability to cure disease. Dr. Shlaes has worked for 30 years in anti-infective academia, industry, and consulting. He served as Professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University for five years, and then moved to industry, where he became vice president of Infectious Diseases at Wyeth Research. Later, he took a position as executive vice president of research and development at Idenix Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and formed his own consulting company. He now works predominantly with biotech companies and venture capital firms in their evaluation of anti-infective companies. While they take different approaches, the two doctors concur that antibiotic resistance is a major problem and that society needs to find ways to slow it down. One way to slow down the spread of resistant bacteria is finding ways to ensure

Like any other organism, bacterium are subject to evolutionary pressure. Antibiotic resistance in bacteria is rarely the result of a single mutation leading to full resistance, but rather the result of a series of mutations that incrementally increased antibiotic resistance. For example, in the case of fluoroquinolone resistance, resistance started with a mutation in the efflux pump, granting Streptococcus pneumoniae the ability to survive certain treatment regimens (13). This became an issue when people started to misuse their antibiotics. In this particular example, because patients did not follow their prescription regimens, they only killed the bacteria not resistant to fluoroquinolone. This selective pressure drove bacteria to further develop fluoroquinolone resistance, meaning that the initial infection remained untreated, and would now require a

Antibiotic resistance is, in simplest terms, just natural selection – but at a hugely exacerbated rate. We can see the effects of natural selection in ourselves; that’s why we don’t have webbed fingers, because they didn’t exactly benefit the terrestrial human race. But while it takes human beings 20-30 years to reproduce, it takes most bacteria 20-30 minutes. Think about that for a second. By reproducing every 20 minutes, a single E. Coli bacterium can create 70 billion new bacteria in just 12 hours. About 2% of those bacteria will have some type of mutation, and

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

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “Antibiotic resistance is the ability of microbes to resist the effects of drugs – that is, the germs are not killed, and their growth is not stopped. Although some people are at greater risk than others, no one can completely avoid the risk of antibiotic-resistant infections” (“About Antimicrobial Resistance”). Antibiotic resistance has a higher chance of occurring with the more antibiotics taken, as the body adapts more and more each time. The CDC has collected data across the country, and has concluded that the estimated number of deaths caused by antibiotic resistance is 23,000, and that the number of illnesses is slightly higher than 2 million (“About Antimicrobial Resistance”). Already antibiotic resistance has affected millions of lives, and will continue to affect many more until antibiotic overuse is stopped

Antibiotics are used by millions of people every day, myself included. Their uses include a wide variety of circumstances like treating common colds or battling infections during surgeries. The versatility of the antibiotic also happens to be its greatest downfall. The overuse and misuse of these medications, as well as a lack of new drug development by the pharmaceutical industry contributes to the rapid growth of antibiotic resistance. The emergence of resistant bacteria occurring worldwide, endangers the efficacy of antibiotics. While the effects of these resistant bacteria may seem small, in 25 to 50 years the outcome could result in a “post-antibiotic era.” Moreover, many farmers and agriculturists advocate for the use of antibiotics

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).

The main causes of the problem are two pharmacological issues: (a) wide-spectrum antibiotics and (b) compliance. Wide-spectrum antibiotics are widely used to treat infections, either those caused by several different species or those for which diagnosis is too difficult or takes too much time. Of course, wide spectrum promises a wide range of clinical uses and sales but consequently contributes to resistance as it applies selective pressure. Compliance is another issue that has many aftermaths upon antimicrobial resistance. Patients often either miss drug doses, both by mistake and deliberately, or decide to stop the treatment prematurely when they feel better. In both cases, pathogens which are exposed to subinhibitory concentrations of antibiotics, survive and that consequently results in the greater chances of acquiring resistance. (Sosa et at., 2010)

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).

Antibiotics are widely used drugs in the day – to – day medical treatments of the 20th century. Diseases that were once almost threatening are now cured sparingly easily by means of antibiotics. For one thing, if antibiotics are used in right doses they serve as life – saving tools, on the other hand over use of antibiotics is life threatening. Antibiotics were particularly used for treating the bacterial infections but, in modern day medical sciences antibiotics have become the most commonly prescribed drugs for both bacterial and viral diseases/ infections. For the reason that, over use of antibiotics is causing the common bacteria to gain resistance against the medicines. As a result of this, antibiotics are not performing as they are intended to use (Mike Stobbe, 2013). Consumption of antibiotics in large quantities has proven to cause severe health problems like, obesity, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel diseases, allergies certain hormonal production and asthma.