For many antibiotics can be of great value, treating infections that were once incurable. Many lives have been saved by the regular use of antibiotics, but recently there has been a spike in the amount of antibiotic resistant infections. Ones that can have developed to be practically untreatable and extremely deadly. That’s exactly what happened in the case of Carlos Don. The once healthy 12 year old who left for 6th grade camp healthy as could be came back sicker than ever. His worried parents subsequently took him to urgent care where they determined all he had was pneumonia and Carlos was sent home with orders to take a host of antibiotics to treat his infection. While all seemed as though it was going to resolve itself Carlos was rushed …show more content…
Forty years ago scientists and physicians alike knew that this was a major dilemma. In the 1970’s near Boston a group of scientists conducted a study on 300 chickens, giving half feed laced with a common antibiotic, oxytetracycline, and the other half, the control, normal feed. After 12 weeks 70% of the fecal E. coli had developed multi-drug resistance. Meaning that not only had they developed a resistance to tetracycline, but they had also developed a resistance to three other drugs through the transfer of plasmids. This demonstrates that this issue is not new or not of importance. We 've known about the danger of the overuse of antibiotics for a extensive time. “The current practice of applying the most antibiotic tonnage to growth promotion in food animals and plants is incompatible with an expectation that antibiotics will cure life-threatening infections.” The European Union has already put sanctions in place that restrict the use of antibiotics in animal feed. This has helped to keep antibiotics effective in the medical …show more content…
Claiming that while a bacteria might be resistant to certain antibiotics they 're highly unlikely to be resistant to all antibiotics. So therefore, restricting certain antibiotics could potentially have negative effects on patients battling severe infections. Each year these ABR bacteria infect 2 million people and in that process kill 23 thousand. These are trends that are only increasing by the day. We are facilitating our own demise by continuing on this path of overuse antibiotics in the medical and agricultural world. Something has to be changed or we will revert back to a pre-antibiotic era. Another valid argument is that with less than 1% of the entire United States problem having to deal with this issue that it’s not a big enough cause for concern. That there are more important issues such as cancer which has infected 8.5% of the total U.S. population. There are more valuable diseases and medical issues to deal with than simply antibiotic resistant
According to USA Today, U.S. doctors are prescribing enough antibiotics to give to 4 out of 5 Americans every year, an alarming pace that suggests they are being excruciatingly overused. In fact, Dr. Aunna Pourang from MD states, “to give you an idea of how high the pressure is to prescribe antibiotics, I didn’t get a job once because during the interview I told the lead physician that I only prescribe antibiotic prescriptions when they are warranted.” The development and widespread obsession of antibiotics, or drugs that kill bacteria and thereby reduce infection, has helped billions of people live longer, healthier lives. Unfortunately, the more we rely on and abuse antibiotics, the more bacteria develop resistance to them, which makes treating infections that much more challenging and leads to the growth of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. Research from the Center of Disease Control found that two million people in the United States become infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria, while 23,000 people die from such infections each year. Americans often aren’t informed on the power of the human body and rush to assumptions when perfection isn’t present. In a nutshell, the obsession of antibiotics is quite deadly and needs to be addressed before it’s too
Antibiotic resistance is one of the most important issues facing health care today, with wide reaching future implications if abuse continues. In the United States alone, antibiotic resistance is responsible for over two million illnesses and 23,000 deaths per year. Providers need to be judicious in the disbursement of these life saving pharmacological agents, while being informative of why antibiotics are not always the answer (Talkington, Cairns, Dolen, & Mothershed, 2014). In the case listed below, several issues need to be addressed including perception, knowledge deficit, and the caregiver’s role. This paper will focus on whether a prescription for antibiotics is appropriate and other courses of action that may be taken instead.
Nearly every aspect of law enforcement has a court decision that governs criteria. Most court rulings are the result of civil lawsuit towards a police officer and agency. However, currently, there is no law that mandates law enforcement driver training. When it comes to firearms, negligence by officers has resulted in a multitude of court rulings. Popow v. City of Margate, 1979, is a particularly interesting case that outlines failed firearms training by an agency. In this case, an officer chasing a suspect during a foot pursuit fired at the suspect, striking and killing an innocent bystander (Justia.com, 2017). The court ruled that the agency was “grossly negligent” of “failure to train” (Justia.com, 2017). As a result, nearly every agency requires annual firearms training and has written policy concerning the same. Officers must show proficiency in firearms use every year to maintain their certification. Many states even impose fines on officers for
On February 3rd, 2013, patient Carlos Ramirez was referred to my office by his 1st psychiatrist with symptoms of severe depression and preoccupations with health disorders. Patient has had adverse side effects with Prozac and Zoloft. Carlos has been seen by primary care physician and 2 mental health officials to discuss his feelings of impending death and depression. Upon arrival, Carlos and I spoke about his early life, what events triggered his current pattern of thinking, what in his personal life has changed recently, and what other treatment plans have been used to help cure Carlos’ feelings of depression. Carlos described symptoms of despair, poor concentration on topics, loss of interest in daily tasks and subjects that once brought interest, and tearfulness at thoughts of passing and what state this would leave his children and family in. He has been hospitalized for his depression and reported that a mixture of anti-depression and anti-anxiety drugs helped to lift symptoms temporarily. His reported symptoms are consistent of the previous diagnosis of depression. Depression is classified as the inability to do things once found enjoyable, fear to move forward in one’s life, loss of self, and debilitating feelings of sorrow. Carlos’ has many symptoms concurrent with those of depression. Carlos also has a history of medical and mental disorders in his father’s side of the family.
In our community right now, medical researchers are testing antibiotics that may have chemicals to disable the resistance of this organism. But while research continues, it is vital to be aware of how these deadly germs spread and what we can do to prevent them.
“The World Health Organization projects that as drug effectiveness decreases and antibiotic resistance increases, public education becomes more and more crucial” (476) Antibiotics were discovered in 1940 and since have been abused and misused. Between bad practices and lack of proper education antibiotic resistance has been allowed to occur. The only way to combat bacterial infections is with strong patient education and following the correct schedule in taking antibiotics.
Rex, and Anderson. Wise antibiotic use in the age of drug resistance. New York: Cohen, 1997. Print.
When bacteria are frequently exposed to antibiotics it can become resistant to the drug so that it is no longer effective in treating a specific illness (Visser). To compensate for unhygienic environments and to accelerate growth, antibiotics are often given to food animals in the U.S. In 2011, 29.9 million pounds of antibiotics were sold in America for meat and poultry production ("Record"). Many of the types of antibiotics used in food animal production is also used in human medicine, and according to the WHO, “widespread use of antim...
Resistance arises from mutations that are not under the control of humans, but the evolution of bacteria has been sped along by the overexposure of antibiotics to both people and animals. The number of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria in an area is closely related to the frequency that antibiotics that are prescribed (Todar, 2012). Patients often unnecessarily demand antibiotics to treat common colds or simple illnesses that are not caused by bacteria. Instead, these infections are caused by viruses which, unlike bacteria, are unaffected by antibiotics. Incorrect diagnosis can also lead patients to using unnecessary antibiotics, which can sometimes be even more dangerous than otherwise left untreated. Besides the fact that antibiotics kill off beneficial bacteria in the intestines, misuse of antibiotics provides an opportunity ...
our everyday lives bacteria is constantly surrounding us, some of the bacterium that we encounter are beneficial to us but then there are the ones that are severely detrimental to our health. The way that they effect a persons body can differ from person to person. Many of the “microscopic foes” are very resilient and have a very fast reproduction rate. Not only do they reproduce quickly they sometimes seem to outsmart our immune system and not allow our bodies to fight the infection making it almost impossible to stop them. One thing that a lot if people rely on is the assistance of prescription drugs to get them better but even the drugs are not being effective and we can’t stop the pathogens from invading our personal places such as work, home, school, or anywhere. Even though modern medicine is advancing the pathogens could still get the get the best of us. The scary thing is we never know when the next pandemic or epidemic is going to arise. All it needs is some ordinary microbe to swap genes with a deadly germ to produce a “super pathogen” and it could happen to anyone, anywhere, as it did to Jeannie Brown who is from “our neck of the woods”.
In the last decade, the number of prescriptions for antibiotics has increases. Even though, antibiotics are helpful, an excess amount of antibiotics can be dangerous. Quite often antibiotics are wrongly prescribed to cure viruses when they are meant to target bacteria. Antibiotics are a type of medicine that is prone to kill microorganisms, or bacteria. By examining the PBS documentary Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria and the article “U.S. government taps GlaxoSmithKline for New Antibiotics” by Ben Hirschler as well as a few other articles can help depict the problem that is of doctors prescribing antibiotics wrongly or excessively, which can led to becoming harmful to the body.
This turn of events presents us with an alarming problem. Strains of bacteria that are resistant to all prescribed antibiotics are beginning to appear. As a result, diseases such as tuberculosis and penicillin-resistant gonorrhea are reemerging on a worldwide scale (1). Resistance first appears in a population of bacteria through conditions that favor its selection. When an antibiotic attacks a group of bacteria, cells that are highly susceptible to the medicine will die.
Thesis: With the advent of antibiotics in 1929 Fleming said, "The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops.Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant."With the overuse of antibiotics today we have seen this very idea come to be.Over usage is caused most prevalently by a lack of education on the part of the patient.Thus stated, the way to overcome such a circumstance is to educate, not only the patient but also the physician.
...gests that the world is on the brink of a post-antibiotic era as the numbers of resistant bacteria (superbugs) proliferate, and there is an increase in the number of people dying from previously treatable infections. Todar, (n.d) states, “Society could be faced with previously treatable diseases that have become again untreatable, as in the days before antibiotics were developed.”
It is estimated that over one-half of the antibiotics in the U.S. are used in food animal production. The overuse of antimicrobials in food animal production is an under-appreciated problem. In both human and veterinary medicine, the risk of developing resistance rises each time bacteria are exposed to antimicrobials. Resistance opens the door to treatment failure for even the most common pathogens and leads to an increasing number of infections. The mounting evidence of the relationship between antimicrobial use in animal husbandry and the increase in bacterial resistance in humans has prompted several reviews of agricultural practices by scientific authorities in a number of countries, including the US.