Why the uncontrolled use of antibiotics is becoming dangerous and what can we do to mitigate this, so antibiotics are normally used to treat bacterial infections.
But the users in an uncontrolled manner when they're prescribed they're not necessary and this is quite common for like viral infections and also when people take them for longer or shorter than prescribed and the major consequence of the uncontrolled use is antibiotic resistance as this creates selective pressure for resistant bacteria and these growing prevalence and this means that
less antibiotics are able to treat um like severe infections which may be life-threatening examples of this include MRSA
which is particularly prevalent in hospitals where people are more likely to be vulnerable to the bacterial disease and the greatest concern of this is that new strains of bacteria will emerge that cannot be treated by any current antibiotics so in order to mitigate these consequences there's kind of a field or an area of research called antibiotic stewardship and one of the main kind of principles of this is changing the way in which doctors prescribe so for example not prescribing things for viral infections or just because the patient you know wants to be prescribed antibiotics and i think the recommends that they're not prescribed for kind of routinely like for a mild sore throat for example and then also people can take personal actions like taking them for the exact amount of time they're prescribed and you know not sharing them and also just generally better hygiene to reduce the rate of bacterial infection and similarly vaccinating against bacterial diseases like the pneumococcal vaccine and that will reduce the need for antibiotics.
what are antibiotics these are chemical substances that help fight off bacterial infections by either killing the bacteria themselves and these areknown as bacteriocidal antibiotics or by preventing the bacteria from reproducing and these are known as bacteriostatic antibiotics so these are the mechanisms as to how antibiotics may work and now looking at some examples the most popular example of antibiotics that i'm sure all of you would have heard of is penicillin and all of its derivatives so most of the times when you go to the gp you are prescribed some sort of derivative of penicillin for example amoxicillin so anything ending insulin is just a penicillin derivative and they're all antibiotics um and so a bit of a history detour how were antibiotics discovered they were discovered by a scientist named alexander fleming who was a bit of a careless lab technician and left a culture of bacteria just out in the open and forgot to cover it up when he came back from his two-week vacation apparently he saw that a mold had developed and wherever the mould was the bacteria was no longer there so there was definitely some sort of active agent in the mold that had killed off the bacteria when he studied the mold more he found out that this was penicillin and he named that active agent in penicillium penicillin and we started extracting that from penicillium started using that as antibiotics and now we've moved on and we can artificially create that in labs now moving on to the next part of this answer and that is antibiotic resistance so what is it it is a mechanism by which bacteria become resistant to antibiotics so certain antibiotics don't work on them anymore and therefore won't be effective in fighting off that bacterial infection and how does this arise so this is a very simple biological phenomenon that all of you heard of before and that is simple and basic evolution so what happens in your body for example is is that you have a whole host of bacteria in your body and you've been infected by them and you take a course of antibiotics and say that kills 99 off the bacteria but for some reason one percent of the bacteria just isn't killed off and this is probably because they have some sort of a mutation that made them resistant to the antibiotics and this is just purely by chance this is a mutation that is purely random and purely by chance but since that strain
of bacteria is the only one that's left alive that is the only one that can continue to reproduce and produce offspring and pass on that mutation to its offspring and thus all of the new bacteria now will have that mutation and will be resistant to that particular antibiotic and this is an increasingly common phenomenon making lots of antibiotics pretty much useless an example of this that you may have heard of is methicillin resistant staph aureus so now doctors have to prescribe a different set of antibiotics to work against staph aureus however this poses its own issues and can create a new set of antibiotic resistant bacteria such as multiple drug-resistant grab-negative bacilli interestingly when fleming was awarded his nobel prize he actually spoke about antibiotic resistance and predicted it and spoke about how people may underdose themselves and by giving themselves a non-lethal dose of the antibiotic that could eventually make the bacteria resistant to antibiotics and he was absolutely right next what are the consequences of antibiotic resistance first and very obviously if bacteria are going to be resistant to antibiotics and antibiotics can no longer kill bacteria we can no longer fight off bacterial infections and that is very very dangerous especially for immunocompromised populations if antibiotics can't treat bacterial diseases we will soon go back to a world where surgeries could be fatal and could cause sepsis very easily back in the ages before antibiotics certain bacteria almost had an 80 mortality rate something that is unheard of in today's day and age and so antibiotic resistance is a very scary phenomenon and is something that we need to actively fight against now moving on to solutions for antibiotic resistance always start small so let's look at the individual level first first off it's really important that you finish your course of antibiotics even if you start to feel better and this is to make sure that absolutely every single bacteria is killed off in your body and there's no bacteria left that can pass on mutations that could potentially cause antibiotic resistance second make sure that you don't ask your gp for antibiotics unnecessarily if the gp thinks this is a bacterial infection they will prescribe you antibiotics but remember there are multiple diseases such as calls that you might think would be fixed by antibiotics but they're actually viral in nature and antibiotics would do nothing for them and lastly it's really important to get vaccinated wherever possible if you're vaccinated against certain diseases then that means the bacteria can't infect you in the first place and you wouldn't need the antibiotics now moving on to the next level the healthcare and agriculture industries so antibiotics are also used in the agriculture industries to kill off bacteria in animal feeds and so on so again it's really important to minimize the use of antibiotics and make sure you're just using them for the right purposes and only when it is a confirmed bacterial case so a new concept of antibiotic stewardship has come up in the healthcare industry and the candidates spoke about it very well so there's nothing much else for me to say about that but that is a great way to regulate the use of antibiotics as a healthcare professional now the last level that we're looking at is the government and policymakers and researchers it's really important for government and policy makers to increase their spending and funding for research in antibiotics the last completely new antibiotic was discovered back in the 80s and it's been so long and no wonder there is antibiotic resistance it's really.
Important for big pharmacies to also invest in creating new antibiotics so we can prevent these issues from coming up in the future.
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