The CDC's Campaign to Prevent Antimicrobial Resistance Essay

Inappropriate use of antibiotics plays a significant part in developing of drug-resistant HAI. Use antibiotics for viral infections; over prescriptions; prescription following “better be safe, then sorry ” rule; fear of health care providers (HCP) being sued, if no medication was prescribed; reimbursement to the acute care facilities for drug cost and expenses for MDRO treatment by insurance companies, all these factors provide no incentive to minimize use of antibiotics.(5)

Antibiotic resistance can develop wherever antibiotics are: medical facilities, animal products and communities. Breaks in infection control, inadequate water sanitation and poor hygiene all contribute to the spread of resistant bacteria from person to person (Collignon, et al., 2015). The majority of antibiotic usage worldwide is in animals raised as a food source (Collignon, et al., 2015). 80% of antibiotic use in the United States is for growth promotion and disease prevention of farm animals used for food sources (CDC, 2015). This usage of antibiotics leads to the development of resistant bacteria, which spread to people via the food chain or water (Collignon, et al., 2015).

Millions of lives are saved every single day because of antibiotics treating common infections, allowing organ transplants, as well extending the average lifespan by decades. About half of the emergency cases treated in the intensive care units in the video “Antibiotic Resistance—Catalyst” are suffering from bacterial infections as well as coming to terms that it is no longer treatable, because bacteria are rapidly becoming resistant to all the antibiotics we have. By overusing this incalculable medical resource, we are basically risking the loss the potency of antibiotics, which is a threat to the human race.

Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria changes and reduces the effectiveness of an antibiotic. Using the wrong antibiotic for disease-causing bacteria can end in an overuse of that antibiotic and promotes antibiotic-resistance. Information gathered by the Bash the Bug Project can be used to find the correct antibiotic to fight certain disease-causing bacteria. Therefore, limiting bacteria’s opportunity to develop antibiotic-resistance. This is important to the general public because antibiotic-resistant bacterium is more difficult to kill, requires a more expensive treatment, and is given more of an opportunity to spread. While antibiotic resistance cannot be completely stopped, prescribing the correct antibiotic can greatly slow the spread of antibiotic resistance infections. The Bash the Bug project will then allow more time for newer drugs that can fight antibiotic resistant bacteria that are already in

New Haven Health (Yale). (n.d.).Healthcare Associated Infections and the Prevention and Control of Multi-Drug Resistant Organisms (MDRO). Retrieved from http://www.ynhh.org/vSiteManager/Upload/Images/Professionals/MDRO.pdf

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

The increase in infection-related health activity is the result of a gradual increase in specific risk factors such as antibiotic pressure and the greater complexity of patients’ conditions. Despite their strong impact, both socially and economically, the surveillance systems and programs currently deployed for the prevention of nosocomial infections are quite dishomogeneous and, in many situations, do not exist at all.

Katherine, antimicrobial resistance is one of my favorite topics to write about, and sadly if nothing is done, we are heading to an era where antimicrobials will no longer have an effect on infections due to their increased resistance. That is why, nurses have a very important role in educating their patients on the need to comply to an entire antimicrobial treatment, in order not to aggravate the problem even more. It is also good to know that there will be a United Nations meeting about the issue soon, hopefully we will have some effective solutions to this very serious problem in a near future.

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).

The phenomenon of antibiotic resistance occurs when bacterial organisms can resist – via several different avenues – the harmful effects of antibiotic drugs, which ultimately results in a selective advantage that is not shared amongst the remainder of the population that is still susceptible to the effects of the drugs. There are numerous ways that bacteria are known to show resistance to antibiotics. Some bacteria can modify the chemical nature of the drug, making it ineffective, and yet some possess a different form of target site that the drug is not compatible with, which inhibits the drug’s ability to bind to the bacterial cell. When coupled with prevalent antibiotic use amongst human populations, these acquired mechanisms of resistance can be selectively advantageous to the bacteria in possession of them. Being resistant to one or more antibiotic drugs means that these bacteria can survive and pass on their genes for resistance to their offspring, which can have negative effects on human populations, especially in the healthcare setting. Antibiotic resistance has garnered much attention in recent years across the developed world, as pathogenic microbes become resistant to more and more antibiotics thanks to both the overuse and misuse of these drugs. The increased frequency of which this problem has

Imagine getting sick with a bug that should be easily treated, but your doctor has not been able to prescribe anything to provide relief. Instances like this have become more common in the past two decades do to the emergence of drug resistant infections. This is not only a problem that the United States faces but it’s a worldwide crisis. In this paper I will address how overuse of antibiotics has caused an influx of drug resistant infections specifically C-Diff and how this impacts human health worldwide and the efforts to fight against it. Literature searches using the databases CINAHL Complete and PubMed were used to gather data on the overuse of antibiotics contributing to C-Diff. A total of 98 articles were generated using specific

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).

Hence, drug resistance is the neglected issue in Bioethics and an underappreciated topic in medical, economical and policy issue (Selgelid, 2007, p. 221).

It is vital for the global community to recognize the dangers of antibiotic resistance and the importance of addressing it. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today” (INSERT CITATION). Before the development of antibiotics, infectious diseases, such as bacterial meningitis and strep throat, killed thousands of people, especially children, a year. These once-fatal diseases are now easily treatable with antibiotics. However, the rise of antibiotic resistance threatens to make these diseases fatal once again. Compounding the issue of increasing resistance is the slow development of new antibiotics. Only two new classes of antibiotics have been developed and placed on the marker in the past few decades (Battle super bugs citation). Antibiotic resistance has tremendous implications for global health and economics, as discussed in this section.

Antimicrobial or antibiotic resistance is a phenomenon seen when a certain microorganism (certain types of bacteria) develops a resistance for a drug that is used formerly to kill them. These resistant bacteria are emerging rapidly worldwide, affecting how a certain bacterial infection might be cured, and therefore rising a threat for patients who were treated with antibiotics a long time ago if the same type of infection. Antibiotic resistance occurred due to the overuse and misuse of a certain medication. (Ventola, C. L. (2015)). Antibiotic resistance conveys incurability for treatable illnesses which would cause a great dent in the healthcare system, rendering it useless. As a result of antibiotic resistance, human illnesses, cost, length of treatment, and side effects from using more powerful medications will increase with time if nothing is done to create an awareness for using antibiotics as treatments for various infections. Certain groups of people (infants, seniors, homeless living in an unhygienic conditions) are at higher risk of getting illnesses that would create the need to use antibiotics as treatments than other groups of people (that normally practice full hygiene). In my opinion, antibiotics should only be used in cases where it’s the last option available as a treatment, because the abuse of using antibiotics will only cause more problems later on in finding treatments for infections and other illnesses where bacteria is the cause of disease. Also, there