Antimicrobial Resistance

Alarming to physicians and patients, bacteria is becoming more increasingly resistant to antibiotics, such as penicillin. There are three main reasons why this is happening:

1. over prescribing and mis-prescribing

2. insufficient duration of treatment and misuse of antibiotics by patients

3. use of antibiotics as growth promoters in livestock

First, over and mis prescribing. This is when doctor's fail to completely examine a patient or give an antibiotic prescription not knowing if it is a virus or a bacteria. Antibiotics do not work against the flu and most colds. All it does then, is increase the bacteria in your body's resistance for next time. Make sure what you have is a bacterial infection before you take antibiotics. Know this, and if your doctor prescribes antibiotics, ask him whether or not your ailment is a virus or bacteria, or if you'd be fine not taking them. Do not insist on antibiotics if you have the flu or a cold. Treat the symptoms instead.

Second, insufficient duration and misuse. This is when a patient is directed to take antibiotics for 10 days, and after they feel better after 4, stop taking the medication. This causes most of your body's normal bacteria and the illness-causing bacteria to be mostly wiped out, but leaves enough left that what is left will mutate and evolve to now be resistant or more so to antibiotics. Next time, they won't work as well until they don't work at all. If you are given a prescriptions with duration instructions, follow them exactly, even if you are feeling well. If you have extra antibiotics in your home from not completing a duration of treatment, do not take those the next time you feel under the weather. Do not give them to others, take them yourself, or use them instead of a doctor's visits. Properly dispose of them.

Third, antibiotics as growth promoters. On farms, there are lots of chickens and they inbreed and are genetically altered to be bigger. This means greater susceptibility and one bacterial disease could wipe out an entire farm. To prevent this, low doses of antibiotics are placed in the food. When we eat the meat, we get the remnants of the antibiotics. Veterinarians and farmers argue that the antibiotics they use in the animal feed is different than antibiotics used for humans. While this is true, they are the same classes...so that doesn't make it any better. I'm not sure what you should do about this, necessarily. I'm not saying to not eat meat. Just be aware that this is a controversial issue.

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extra information:

- antibiotics are natural compounds produced by environmental microorganisms

- topical antibiotics are not a problem.

- because of this growing resistance, we soon will not be able to cure common diseases, and people will die from things we should be able to cure.

- something you can do to prevent resistance is to be vaccinated for diseases (such as the flu or pneumonia) that use antibiotics as a treatment. That way, you won't even have an issue.

- antibiotics work by finding a susceptible part of the bacteria and destroying it.

- in recent years, the production of antibiotics has gone down. This is a problem, as the current ones we have won't work after a few years. We need to continue production of antibiotics in order to prevent needless deaths from common bacterial infections.

- the CDC has a great page about antibiotic/antimicrobial resistance (all links on page).