For the larger portion of human history we have considered bacteria to be the worst kind of killer. Before 1928, people died all the time from bacteria that we now consider child’s play. The reason being that in 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered mold in a discarded petri dish. He then observed that the mold was killing the bacteria that he had been growing in the petri dish. After that point in time they began mass producing this newly discovered mold or antibiotic that Fleming named Penicillin. Penicillin saved thousands of lives in World War II and has been crushing bacterial infection ever since it was first used.
All over the world we have been putting antibiotics into everything imaginable. Things like dog food, air fresheners and even garbage bags in an attempt to stop bacteria from spreading in our homes. But instead of killing the bacteria once and for all we may just be making them stronger. Every bacteriologist’s nightmare is coming true. Bacteria are beginning to be almost impossible to kill.
Scientists fear that the age of Penicillin may be coming to an end. Bacteria of all kinds are beginning to be resistant to antibiotics. One in particular is Tuberculosis, or TB. In Russia the
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Molly Cason from Clinical Correlations stated “In a city of over 8 million people, New York City has an annual tuberculosis case rate of 11.4 per 100,000 people, which is more than twice the national average.” When penicillin came out in 1928 people were ecstatic. Every time one of their children felt abnormally tired they would give them an antibiotic pill and send them to bed. We have created this problem. This is our fault. We made bacteria mutate faster and now we are having trouble keeping up. But this story may end like The Hare and the Tortoise. We may not be able to evolve faster than mother nature but we might be able to win the race in a different
Once believed to be easily treated and prevented, Tuberculosis (TB) has recently been making a steady comeback. Previous to modern medicine, TB claimed millions of victims, spreading from person to person like wildfire. Around the 17th-18th centuries, the “White Plague” took the lives of 1 in 5 adults (20%) in Europe and North America (Iseman, 1994). However, as technological advances progressed, this seemingly ferocious viral disease became a primal, insignificant thing of the past. But, in the nature of all bacteria, TB has, in the recent years, mutated to become progressively drug resistant. Why is Tuberculosis coming back with a vengeance? Well, the answer’s quite simple. TB has done an amazing job of standing in the corner and
we may be overridden by diseases that are not easily treated by just popping a couple of pills.
While tuberculosis was never completely eliminated, there was a significant drop in cases and death rates, as a result of the BCG vaccine and new anti-tubercular drugs in the 1950’s.
Tuberculosis is a disease of an infectious nature caused by a bacterium known as mycobacterium tuberculosis. The disease spreads through the air. People with the disease can spread it to susceptible people through coughing, sneezing, talking or spitting. It mainly affects the lungs and other parts such as the lymph nodes and kidneys can also be affected. The symptoms for TB are fatigue, coughing, night sweats, weight loss and fever. One third of the population of the world is affected with mycobacterium tuberculosis. The rate of infection is estimated to be one person per second. About 14 million people in the world are infected with active tuberculosis. Drug resistant TB has been recorded to be a serious public health hazard in many countries. Resistant strains have developed making it difficult to treat the disease. TB has caused millions of death mainly in people living with HIV/AIDS ADDIN EN.CITE Ginsberg19981447(Ginsberg, 1998)1447144717Ginsberg, Ann M.The Tuberculosis Epidemic: Scientific Challenges and OpportunitiesPublic Health Reports (1974-)Public Health Reports (1974-)128-13611321998Association of Schools of Public Health00333549http://www.jstor.org/stable/4598234( HYPERLINK l "_ENREF_3" o "Ginsberg, 1998 #1447" Ginsberg, 1998). The World Health Organization came up with the DOTS (Directly Observed, Therapy, Short course) strategy. The approach involves diagnosing cases and treating patients with drugs for about 6-8
The article “The End of Antibiotics” discusses a 57 year old man that was dying and how doctors could only sit by while his condition deteriorated. This man was not shot or stabbed, he was infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria that was slowly killing him. He died months later after being bombarded with antibiotics in the form of capsules, tablets, and IVs (Begley par.1). This is the unsettling power that superbugs like this one has over modern day medicine. A superbug is a bacteria that has evolved its cellular structure to resist antibiotics. Dr. Richard Wenzel of the University of Iowa stated, “Only a few years after penicillin came into wide use with World War II, strains of staph had emerged
As a writer for The Globe and Mail, Jennifer Yang, stated, “Anti-bacterial products containing anti-microbial agents are being increasingly marketed to Canadians for personal and household use despite a lack of evidence for additional benefit and serious concerns about the potential for increased bacterial resistance.” The concern she is talking about is centred in the use of the products such as disinfectant sprays, of which can kill 99.9% of bacteria on a given surface. The 0.1% that is left remaining is the mutated antibiotic-resistant super bug which the disinfectant is unable to kill due to its mutated nature. And being the only type left, it has no competitors remaining for resources and can divide at a rapid pace, giving birth to a larger colony of highly dangerous pathogens. The same phenomena occurs when patients stop taking antibiotics half way through their treatment. The amount of bacteria in their body at that point has a higher percentage of stronger bacteria than the weaker. Therefore, when the patient decides to stop their antibiotic treatment, they inadvertently create more resistant bacteria than there originally was in their body, as the mutated bacteria now has more room to grow. If those bacteria are then passed on to another person, the rate of resistant bacteria dramatically increases, raising the amount of near invincible pathogens in the world by another percentage.
Tuberculosis has been part of human history for a long time but how long is a long time? Recent research using genetic data has allowed us to know that the tuberculosis progenitor has been on this planet for about 3 million years affecting even our earlier ancestors (Gutierrez et al, 2005). Additionally this research showed that the bacilli from tuberculosis are capable of mixing sections of their genome with other strains and giving the pathogen a composite assembly, which resulted from ancient horizontal exchanges before its clonal expansion. This quality provided tuberculosis a big advantage that even now a days allows the organism to evade, adapt and create resistance to treatments that were once successful. In order to fix current and
Tuberculosis, the white plague as used to be called once upon a time is still one of the deadliest bacterial killers affecting almost all parts, all corners of the globe. Though successful anti-tubercular antibiotic regimens and effective vaccine are available for decades and being used in the battle against Koch’s bacillus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of this chronic multi organ granulomatous disease, our strand in the battle continuously seems to be in the losing side. Moreover the increasing prevalence of HIV-AIDS and diabetes mellitus is being proved to be providing predisposition to tuberculosis. As witnessed by the WHO, which has estimated that, in the year 2012, 8.6 million people have developed tuberculosis and 1.3 million have died of the disease including 320000 deaths of HIV-TB co-infected people (Global tuberculosis report 2013. World Health Organization; 2013). Long term antibiotic therapy and that too associated with several side effects and discomforts have diminished patient compliance with the anti-tubercular chemotherapy. This fact in turn has raised the new deadlier MDR-TB and XDR-TB strains. The whole scenario is a matter of panic and questioning the effectiveness of anti-tubercular antibiotics, immunologic efficacy of century old BCG vaccine and all other medical advents.
This is evident with tuberculosis, as it is a bacterium that has been infecting the human population for millennium. At present day, it is thought that nearly one-third of the entire human population is infected. Effective treatments for the disease require more than 6 months of antibiotics, which is so out of reach for some populations that tuberculosis still kills 1.5 million people a year. Not only is it a deadly disease, multiple strains have developed to become resistant to the only drugs we have to treat the disease. Clearly, infectious diseases are still a major risk to the human
Antibiotics, composed of microorganisms such as streptomycin and penicillin, kill other infectious microorganisms in the human body. At one point, antibiotics were considered to have “basically wiped out infection in the United States”, but due to their overuse and evolutionary
The discovery of penicillin was one of the most important discoveries in the 1900s and marks a turning point in human history. Penicillin was one of the world’s first antibiotics which eventually evolved into modern antibiotics that are used today; it has often been described as a miracle drug. The discovery of penicillin meant that doctors finally could completely cure their patients of deadly diseases. After World War I, many soldiers died from infected wounds because the antiseptics used, killed the patients’ immunological defences more than they killed the invading bacteria. Penicillin kills bacteria by destroying the cell wall of the microorganism causing the cell to burst; it was very effective in clearing bacteria without harming the
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
Many people think of tuberculosis (TB) as a ‘Dickensian’ era disease. But current figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) show that, alongside HIV, TB is the most deadly infectious disease in the world.
For years now drug resistance is increasing and not just in one or two strands of bacteria, it is in all of them. This resistance makes treating a patient with the infection more difficult to the point where some strands require surgery. Tuberculosis is not a bacterium that you can easily remove from the body though. It takes time and medication for the tuberculosis to be eradicated from the body. The problem is with the advancements of medicine bacterium, like tuberculosis, are starting to produce resistance to not just one or two drugs here or there, but the bacteria is producing resistance for multiple drugs at one time.
No criminal situation should be treated the same. Consequences for crimes should be developed based on several factors. It is safe to say what works for one situation might not work for another. There are different concepts when it comes to dealing with juvenile offenders. Those concepts are treatment (rehabilitative) and punishment (punitive). The treatment or rehabilitative concept is defined as follows: The idea of rehabilitation lays on the presumption that criminal conduct is brought about by some component. This point of view does not deny that individuals settle on decisions to infringe upon the law, however it asserts that these decisions are not a matter of pure "free will." Instead, the choice to perpetrate a wrongdoing is held to be resolved, or possibly intensely affected, by a man 's social surroundings, mental improvement, or biological makeup. Individuals are not all the same—and along these lines allowed to express their will—but instead are distinctive. These "individual differences" shape how individuals carry on, including whether they are prone to infringe upon the law. At the point when individuals are portrayed by different "criminogenic risk factors, for example, an absence of parental love and supervision, peer pressure, antisocial values; they more likely to be included in wrongdoing than individuals not having these experiences and traits. “Punishment, in criminal law, any pain, penalty, suffering, or confinement inflicted upon a person by the