Antibiotic ReSISTANCE
The discovery of Penicillin, by Alexander Fleming, was probably the greatest biological discovery of all time. Some estimate that nearly 200 million people have been saved by antibiotics since they were first used in 1942. Every year more and more lives are being saved by antibiotics as more and more diseases become susceptible to them. If you ' re reading this, it ' s extremely likely that you ' ve used antibiotics yourself- they could have even saved your life.
Every year millions of people depend on antibiotics to survive, but what if we told you that the thing we rely so heavily on is starting to lose its effectiveness? Recently, the UN declared antibiotic resistance as the world’ s“ greatest and most urgent risk”. It has been said that antibiotic resistance is an even more urgent danger than climate change. How can something be considered more urgent, more dangerous than something that slowly ruins our planet?
Antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon in which bacteria becomes more resistant to the certain antibiotic that combats it. It ' s nothing new at all and has been around since penicillin itself was discovered. Only now, it ' s just getting worse.
There are a few reasons as to why it ' s becoming more virulent. One of the main reasons being that antibiotics are so easy to come by now. Doctors often wrongly prescribe antibiotics, for example the use of it to combat viral diseases like the common cold. It ' s because they are so easy to find and purchase that patients and doctors misuse them. As mentioned earlier, antibiotics are sometimes used for viral infections( antibiotics are made for bacterial infections, not viral infections, and are completely useless against them), or are used for absolutely no reason at all as the person is not actually sick. Sometimes, antibiotics are not finished by the consumer or are not taken regularly. When you purchase or are drafted a bottle of antibiotics, you must finish it. The entire course has to be taken, but the problem is that people stop using them when they feel‘ better’. Feeling‘ better’ doesn ' t necessarily mean that they ' re healed, the symptoms could be gone, however the bacteria causing it could still be alive. The are some bacteria strains that have managed to live through the previous doses and can spread their genes again and multiply. Because of this, there have been certain strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria( like MRSA), this is incredibly threatening.