For about 50 years, antibiotics have been the answer to many bacterial infections.
Antibiotics are chemical substances that are secreted by living things. Doctors prescribed these
medicines to cure many diseases. During World War II, it treated one of the biggest killers
during wartime - infected wounds. It was the beginning of the antibiotic era. But just when
antibiotics were being mass produced, bacteria started to evolve and became resistant to these
medicines.
Antibiotic resistance can be the result of different things. One cause of resistance could
be drug abuse. There are people who believe that when they get sick, antibiotics are the answer.
The more times you use a drug, the more it will decrease the effect it has on you. That is
because the bacteria has found a way to avoid the effects of that antibiotic. Another cause of
resistance is the improper use of drugs. When patients feel that the symptoms of their disease
have improved, they often stop taking the drug.
English: example of selection for bacteria by anti...
Klebsiella pneumoniae NDM-1 Metallo-betalactamase ...
What Is Drug Resistance?Just because the symptoms have disappeared it
does not mean the disease has gone away. Prescribed drugs should be taken until all the
medicine is gone so the disease is completely finished. If it is not, then this will just give the
bacteria some time to find a way to avoid the effects of the drug.
One antibiotic that will always have a long lasting effect in history is penicillin. This was
the first antibiotic ever to be discovered. Alexander Fleming was the person responsible for the
discovery in 1928. In his laboratory, he noticed that in some of his bacteria colonies, that he was
growing, were some clear spots. He realized that something had killed the bacteria in these
clear spots, which ended up to be a fungus growth. He then discovered that inside...