Superbug Research Paper

Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria documentary has had me paranoid. It’s scary to think foreign bacteria can enter your body and shut it down. The most informing information was the NDM-1 wasn’t a bacteria it was a resistance gene that can turn bacteria into superbugs. I do think antibiotics are being over used. I agree with M.D Arjun Srinivasan,” the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the environment, the more opportunities we create for these bacteria to become resistant”.

Bacteria that are resistant to several types of antibiotics are called multi-resistant bacteria (also known as superbugs). Superbugs have caused a global epidemic, hiding in plain sight. Every year, superbugs kill off thousands of people, rob them of their health insurance and cost the state millions in order to control this so called epidemic.

Then Tom continues education with a little education on the variety of antibiotics and how “crucial for treating serious human infections” (Philpott). Using a hotlink to a well-known credible organization like the “Food and Drug Administration” back up some of his statistics regarding over use of antibiotics in livestock operations. Tom continually notes

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

Throughout my life, adults have insisted the use of antibiotics to fight against the most inconsequential illnesses, whether it’s the cold or the flu. However, neither illness is due to invasion of bacteria. This misuse can lead to antibiotic resistance, also known as antimicrobial resistance(AMR), currently one of the central issues facing the public health system. While the process for antibiotic resistance occurs naturally through the process of adaptation, the mismanagement of antibiotic resources has accelerated the rate at which the bacteria adapt. The occurrence of this misinformation isn’t limited to a few adults: even some of my peers suggest taking antibiotics when faced with the flu. This leads to asking whether AMR is truly a problem and are present regulations enough to combat the issue.

By weight, eighty percent of antibiotics are used in agriculture to “fatten animals” and “protect them from the conditions in which they are raised” (McKenna). Animals are given micro-doses of antibiotics, that is, a small amount of antibiotics to prevent diseases from occurring. This micro-dosage amount allows for mutation that Fleming described. The routine use of antibiotics in agriculture has led to “[sixty-five] percent of chicken breasts” and “[forty-four] percent of ground beef” to house bacteria “resistant to tetracycline”. Additionally, “[eleven] percent of pork chops carried bacteria resistant to five classes of drugs” (McKenna). These bacteria then spread from animals to the humans who eat them, causing humans to get infections which cannot be treated. The issue isn’t as simple as ceasing to give antibiotics to animals. Most animals raised for consumption live in an environment ripe for infections and diseases to spread. Instead of giving the animals more room to live, the majority of farmers opt to give the animals antibiotics. For cattle, This prevents diseases and death to the immature weaned calves and cattle which saves the rancher both time and money—passing on the savings to the consumers. In a free market society higher prices tend to not go well. However, if antibiotics became useless farmers would have to “[enlarge] barns, [cut] down on crowding, and [delay] weaning”, which ultimately would increase the costs of raising livestock

A Superbug is a bacterium that can live in the human body and has the ability to withstand all forms of antibiotic medication. Superbugs are becoming increasingly significant in modern medicine as they are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics. Antibiotics were discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming (Walsh and McManus, 2000). This resulted in a huge movement forward in medical history and even greatened human life expectancy. Since then antibiotics have been widely used and abused, people began to treat everything with this ‘miracle’ drug. If antibiotics are continually used as bacteria grows exponentially more resistant to them then eventually society will fall back into an era without the readily

we are curing disease. As we use antibiotics, the rapidly mutating microbes grow resistant. While

New bacteria can eventually enter the consumer's body. According to Consumer Reports, superbugs are created very easily, “The reason for this is that when you feed antibiotics to animals, the bacteria in and around the animals are exposed to the drug, and many of them die. But there are always some that the drug can’t kill, and those survive and proliferate. Voila, superbugs." (The). In the book Omnivore’s DIlemma, the author states, “By giving antibiotics to the millions of cattle in the U.S. we are actually breeding new super bacteria that can't be killed by antibiotics” (Chevat and Pollan 60). New incurable bacteria is created and spread. Consumer Reports also explore into the misuse of the antibiotics, “Most recently in 2012, the FDA stated ‘Misuse and overuse of antimicrobial drugs creates selective evolutionary pressure that enables antimicrobial resistant bacteria to increase in numbers more rapidly than antimicrobial susceptible bacteria and thus increases the opportunity for individuals to become infected by resistant bacteria’” (The). The misuse of antibiotics can create bacteria which many people can become infected with. Using antibiotics is causing new incurable bacteria to breed, which can eventually enter the consumer's

The documentary Resistance explains how using antibiotics on livestock enables farmers to house animals in deplorable conditions and maintain their health efficiently. Although high heat kills them, the superbugs spread from animals to people through raw or undercooked meat. This constant treatment of antibiotics allows for the bacteria to develop a way around the antibiotics, making it more difficult for hospitals to treat

The misuse of penicillin and other antibiotics however is causing the growing problem of antibiotic resistance in which seemingly harmless infections turn to be deadly and dangerous. Antibiotics are not only casually used as treatments for bacterial infections, but are also used in agriculture and veterinary medicine, creating controversy on the proper uses of antibiotics. As advancements in the medical fields proved to be beneficial for a short period of time, today the misuse of these innovations are creating more and more problems that have proven to be dangerous to the accustomed health of the global population. Antibiotics were not always considered to be a superficial medication and, in fact, have been naturally used for millions of years, like with ants and their symbiosis with antibiotic producing fungi. Humans do not fully realize the value that antibiotics have brought to the population and do not take measures to preserve their use. In contrast, humans take for advantage the natural benefits that is given to them to overly benefit themselves, such as while creating revenue through mass production despite warning from scientists. This selfish misuse leads to consequences in which the future will have to provide solutions for, and perhaps even follow in the ants’ footsteps.

than they do of AIDS (Boyles 1). The broad use of antibiotics among people and animals has

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.

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).

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).