Answer to Question #118096 in Human Anatomy and Physiology for MAKHUOGA ALFRED FRIDAY

Question

Discuss the danger that antibiotic resistance poses in today’s society, consider how man has contributed to this and suggest any strategies that you think may be able to halt it or prevent its expansion

Answer 1

Just 60-odd years after the Nobel Prize in medicine, which penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming shared with colleagues Howard Flory and Ernst Chain, World Health Organization head Margaret Chan said the world could be "on the verge of a post-antibiotic era." The reason that after only half a century after the start of industrial production of penicillin, mankind was threatened, in the words of Chan, "the end of modern medicine, as we know it," is very simple: microorganisms, like people, also really, really want to live.

Unfortunately, antibiotic resistance in bacteria is an inevitable phenomenon, it occurs precisely because, like any living organism, a bacterium perceives an antibiotic as something foreign, and its task is to survive.

Bacteria and fungi mutate much more often than human cells, so they quickly learn to defend themselves from dangerous drugs. In addition, some types of bacteria are able to "share experience" with relatives, that is, literally change genetic material and thus acquire resistance useful from an evolutionary point of view.

It turns out that the person and the causative agent of the disease are competing - who will respond more quickly to the next "achievement" of another. Fortunately for us, not all harmful microorganisms succeed in this race - therefore, even after 85 years and the availability of dozens of drugs, Fleming’s discovery still remains relevant.

There are some bacteria, for example, pathogens of sore throat - tonsillitis, pharyngitis, which never develop resistance to penicillin. There is a causative agent of syphilis, which is still sensitive to the same penicillin. Why is this happening, scientists can not answer yet. If we manage to solve this phenomenon, maybe it will help us fight antibiotic resistance. I forbade it.

 A real upsurge in the spread of antibiotic resistance genes in pathogens occurred already in the 70s, while the mass production of antibiotics began only in the early 1940s. Where did these genes come from? It turns out that they were present in bacteria long before the era of antibiotic use, performing other functions. The use of antibiotics only increased their distribution, made them unite in new combinations.

The main reason that antibiotic resistance has turned from an inevitable nuisance into a global problem is their uncontrolled use, whether it is for sale in pharmacies without a prescription or for use in agriculture and veterinary medicine. Mycobacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, more known In search of a superbacterium that threatens to finally and irrevocably overcome humanity on the medical front, one does not have to go far - there is always tuberculosis. In some regions of Eastern Europe, multidrug resistance - to several groups of antibiotics at once - has been recorded in almost 50% of cases, and individual strains found in India and Iraq are practically incurable.

The problem of antibiotic resistance around the world is dealt with by truly advanced research centers, but this is not an easy task. Therefore, many say that it is impossible to completely solve the problem only by the development of new drugs, this is really absolutely true.