Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The Discovery of Antibiotics
History of microbiology
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: The Discovery of Antibiotics
Since the beginning of Earth’s existence, bacteria have been both valuable and harmful to the various forms of life. Believed to be the first signs of life and bacteria have further evolved to form all the living things in our world. Because so little information had been obtained in the past, bacteria have been known to grow, upset, and destroy nations and empires. With the progression of time, scientists have been able to collect and understand bacteria enough to digress and sometimes even put a stop to the harm. Bacterial resistance is emerging as an issue in society and scientists are constantly trying to produce answers to these developing concerns. Unfortunately, it seems that bacteria are never that far behind. As scientists discover the means to ending the effects of harmful bacteria, bacteria respond by forming a resistance. Sometimes, due to the lack of treatment, this resistance allows the bacteria to evolve and turn into a deadlier form: the plague. Understanding how bacteria become resistant has become important to scientists, as they work hard in trying to protect our w...
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are created when mutations in the pathogen's genetic code occurs, changing the protein in the bacteria that the antibiotics normally go after into a shape that the antibiotic can not recognize. The average bacteria divides every twenty minutes, so if a contaminated spot has one single bacteria in the morning, there could be trillions on that same spot at the end of the day. That means that when counting all the possibilities of mutations, the amount of mutated offspring that the bacteria might have formed during those replications could be as high as in the millions. Fortunately though, this does not happen so frequently that it is normally an issue. The amount of non-mutated bacteria vastly outnumbers the mutated ones and many of the mutations occurring in the bacteria usually have either a harmful effect, or not effect at all on its function. That means that the pathogen is still relatively less harmful than it c...
An Evolving Epidemic Head scientist at the antibiotic research center at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ohio, Gerry Wright, has studied the genes of 500 streptomyces strains, a type of bacteria, many of which had never previously been identified. All 500 strains held antibiotic-resistance genes and on average were resistant to 8 of 21 tested antibiotics (Sachs). With an average resistance rate as high as 67 percent in some of these streptomyces species, it is evident that antibiotic resistance is a rising problem. Regardless of the countless studies proving antibiotic resistance and articles about the subject, it is one the public knows little about. With such a history of antibiotic benefits, it is difficult to perceive the negative effects these drugs have.
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.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), describes antibiotic resistance is the ability of bacteria or other microbes to resist the effects of antibiotic treatment. () So instead of being destroyed by the medications, the bacteria survives and continues to reproduce, resultant in new communicable diseases that even more difficult to treat.
Simple infections are no longer death sentences, however, immunities to these antibiotics are appearing. The use of antibiotics save lives by crippling the ability of bacteria to damage the human body, and antibodies act as a sidekick to the immune system when fighting off life-threatening illnesses. In “The Life of a Peasant”, William Stearns Davis (1922) focuses on what life would be like for the lowest tier of people in a feudalistic state, and he concluded that often in a world without antibiotics, people lose their lives to easily preventable medical conditions, regardless of whether they are a king or a peasant. Antibiotics are used to fight infections that could otherwise prove deadly. In a time before antibiotics, life was much more difficult for all involved. Before antibiotics were used, many died of simple cuts or scratches that later got infected. If action is not taken, superbugs could grow immune to all of the antibiotics we possess. Superbugs are becoming immune to the ways we fight them, which forecasts a world without the ability to fight these superbugs. In the article “Superbugs Causing Infections at a Tertiary Care Hospital and the Return of Pre-Antibiotic Era!” Kalyan Rajkumar (2016), associate professor of microbiology at King George 's Medical University, as well as his research team, discusses the prevalence of a strain of E. coli that is mostly immune to the majority of current
Slack, John M. and I. S. Snyder. Bacteria and Human Disease. Chicago: Year Book Medical Publishers, Inc., 1978.
One of the many growing concerns in the world today is antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance happens when the bacteria that an antibiotic is made to treat learns how to fight the treatment, and develops a strain of DNA that resists the antibiotic. The resistance is then spread from generation to generation and from one bacteria to another bacteria. The article “Antibiotic Resistance Is Worrisome, but Not Hopeless” states that the misuse and overuse of antibiotics by humans is one of the reasons for the development of resistance but not the only reason. All in all, antibiotics are important to our country's public health. Education is one way that our country could aid the misuse and overuse of antibiotics that leads to resistance. The
, prevention and control in our hospitals, have left South Africa, like the rest of the international community, on the brink of a return to an era of stubbornly resistant pathogenic bacteria towards antibiotics.
Watson, Stephanie. Superbugs: the rise of drug-resistant germs. New York, NY: Rosen Pub., 2010. Print.
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”.
Bacterial resistance to antibiotics has presented many problems in our society, including an increased chance of fatality due to infections that could have otherwise been treated with success. Antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections, but overexposure to these drugs give the bacteria more opportunities to mutate, forming resistant strains. Through natural selection, those few mutated bacteria are able to survive treatments of antibiotics and then pass on their genes to other bacterial cells through lateral gene transfer (Zhaxybayeva, 2011). Once resistance builds in one patient, it is possible for the strain to be transmitted to others through improper hygiene and failure to isolate patients in hospitals.
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. On the other hand, cells that have some resistance from the start or acquire it later may survive. At the same time, when antibiotics attack disease-causing bacteria, they also attack benign bacteria. This process eliminates drug-susceptible bacteria and favors bacteria that are resistant. Two things happen, populations of non-resistant and harmless bacteria are diminished, and because of the reduction of competition from these harmless and/or susceptible bacteria, resistant forms of disease-causing bacteria proliferate. As the resistant forms of the bacteria proliferate, there is more opportunity for genetic or chromosomal mutation (spontaneous DNA mutation (1)) or transformation, that comes about either through a form of microbial sex (1) or through the transference of plasmids, small circles of DNA (1), which allow bacteria to interchange genes with ease. Sometimes genes can also be t...
Resistance develops as a result of natural selection. Due to continuous exposure, the bacterial organism changes its genetic make up and these bacteria with mutations will pass the trait that helps then survive antibacterial mechanisms to their offspring which will eventually become a fully resistant generation. Antibiotic r...
Exposure to antimicrobials fundamentally alters microbial ecosystems of humans, animals and the environment, which may lead to the development of antimicrobial resistance.
When antibiotics first began to see widespread American usage in the 1940’s, they were heralded as a miracle drug, a description that was not far from the mark considering the great number of debilitating or fatal illnesses that they could rapidly cure. In a time where bacterial diseases that today carry few serious health risks in healthy adults—such as strep throat, ear infections, syphilis, and wound infections—often led to serious debilitation or death, the invention of antibiotics was among the greatest single improvements in public health ever made. And today, more than three quarters of a century after Alexander Fleming discovered the antimicrobial properties of penicillin, antibiotics are as important as ever in maintaining a healthy population, from their ability to treat common infections to the safeguards they provide patients undergoing surgeries and other infection-prone procedures that could otherwise be too risky to perform. However, today many doctors and researchers are beginning to fear that this golden era of antibiotics may be coming to an end due to the ever-increasing threat of antibiotic resistance. There are a number of practices that contribute to increased antibiotic resistance, including the unnecessary prescription, improper dosage, and incorrect usage of antibiotic drugs by humans. But one of the major potential causes of antibiotic resistance does not involve human patients at all. Rather, many believe that the excessive use of antibiotics in food animals is among the leading threats to the future of human ability to fight bacterial infections.