History Of Penicillin

In this world, there are countless pathogenic microorganisms, and over the last century, scientists have been trying to find antibiotics that rid those microorganisms. An antibiotic is a medicine that destroys or inhibits the growth of a microbe’s cell wall; microbes cannot survive without their cell wall. For example, penicillin is an antibiotic that has been around since the early 1900s; Alexander Fleming, a scientist, discovered it. At first, many microorganisms were highly susceptible to penicillin, but over time most microorganisms evolved by developing a type of resistance to the antibiotic. For example, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermis, Stenotropnomonas maltophilia,

Dr. Alexander Fleming, accidentally discovered penicillin when one of his cultures had been exposed to it, he noticed that the penicillin had developed zones of inhibition with the culture S. aureus (Markel, D., 2013). Dr. Fleming made an announcement to the world after his discovery of penicillin; he stated that if people overuse this antibiotic, the development of penicillin resistance will occur (Markel, D., 2013). As people became overwhelmed with excitement that a cure to practically all bacterial infections had been discovered; doctors began to do exactly what they were warned not to do, abuse its use. Due to the misuse of the antibiotic, bacterial resistance to penicillin began to

The antibiotic fights this pathogen because “plasmid-encoded β-lactamase has rarely been reported in N. meningitides,” which is why N. meningitides is highly susceptible to penicillin (Zarantonelli, Maria L. et al, 2013). This antibiotic no longer works on other microbes because doctors and pharmacists do not tell their customers or patients the risk of not finishing their prescription. When a subject takes seven out of their ten antibiotics, it kills most of the pathogens; however, not all of them are dead and the ones that are still incognito begin to develop genes that are resistant to the drug. On the other hand, these pills are often overused or not properly prescribed; the overuse of an antibiotic causes the development of bacterial resistance. Penicillin was assumed as an ideal antimicrobial, but no such thing exists because situations such as resistance