Feeling poorly? Maybe you don't need antibiotics -- drug resistance is a growing problem

By Molly Hillyard

May 4, 2005 | Antibiotics are a great thing until they are abused. There should be moderation in all things. In this day and age we overuse antibiotics.

"Our body has the ability to fight of many things, but taking too many antibiotics weakens our immune systems overtime," said Paul Johns, M.D., of Blackfoot, Idaho. "Another concern is when we get immune to the antibiotics, old diseases will aging appear. There is also the rising problem of bacterial diseases in hospitals."

Another medical doctor, Kathy Searle, from Boise, said, "Disease-causing microbes that have become resistant to drug therapy are an increasing public heath problem, Tuberculosis, gonorrhea, malaria, and childhood ear infections are just a few of the diseases that have become hard to treat with antibiotic drugs."

Part of the problem is that bacteria and other microorganisms that cause infections are remarkably resilient and can develop ways to survive drugs meant to kill or weaken them. This antibiotic resistance is due largely to the increasing use of antibiotics.

Resistance happens quickly, in parallel with the use of antibiotics. The very success of antibiotics accounts for part of the resistance problem. The life-saving drugs have changed the way diseases have been treated. It's not only that they are sometimes used to treat viral infections, against which they are impotent. It's also that they are used as props when safer methods might be preferable. It goes to the old saying; use the right drug for the right bug, according to the University of British Columbia Web site.

In a way you could say that the bacteria learn from mistakes. Once resistance develops, all offspring of that bacterium get it. Once the resistant strain is made, everybody who is infected with it will have that resistance problem. According to the Public Health Research Institute, the organisms then pick up further resistance to other drugs all it's going to do is get worse: "Antibiotics were once considered the universal answer to infectious disease; we now know the effective life span of these drugs is limited. The problem, simply, is that we got complacent."

In the New England Journal of Medicine there was an article written that talked about how big is the problem becoming. They said that under a new National Institutes of Health grant, scientists have begun examining whether harmless bacterium carry resistance genes and transmit them to pathogens. Already it's thought that the bacterium Homophiles influenza, which causes ear infections, gained resistance to the antibiotic penicillin during a gene transfer from Escherichia coli during the 1970's. They said that any organism exposed to antibiotics faces the same selective pressure that causes pathogens to become antibiotic resistant. It is said that resistance can lurk undetected in harmless organisms.

The presence of resistance in pathogens is just the tip of the iceberg compared to what's out there in the environment and also what's going on in our hospitals.

"There was complacency in the 1980s. The perception was that we had licked the bacterial infection problem. Drug companies weren't working on new agents. They were concentrating on other areas, such as viral infections," says Michael Blum, M.D., medical officer in the Food and Drug Administration's division of anti-infective drug products. "In the meantime, resistance increased to a number of commonly used antibiotics, possibly related to overuse of antibiotics. In the 1990s, we've come to a point for certain infections that we don't have agents available."

The University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote an article that said that each year, nearly two million patients in the United States get an infection as a result of receiving health care in hospitals. These hospital-acquired infections are often difficult to treat because the bacteria and other microorganisms are resistant to drugs.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that 70 percent of the bacteria causing such infections are resistant to at least on of the drugs most commonly used to treat these infections. In some cases, these organisms are resistant to all approved antibiotics and must be treated with experimental and potentially very toxic drugs.

A student at Utah State University, Erin McEvoy said, "My dad is a doctor so he has told me about the problem of over-using antibiotics. From what I understand, the more often a drug is used, the more likely bacteria are resistant to it."

Jami Dickerson, another student at Utah State University said, "I heard about the antibiotic resistance but didn't know it was such a big deal. I think that it is important for students at Utah State University to understand the effects of over-using antibiotics."

It is a big deal according to experts in the field who explain it as "Survival of the Fittest." Every time a patient takes penicillin or another antibiotic for a bacterial infection, the drug may kill most of the bacteria. But a few tenacious germs may survive by mutating or acquiring resistance genes from other bacteria. These surviving genes can multiply quickly, creating drug-resistant strains. The presence of these strains may mean that the patient's next infection will not respond to the first-choice antibiotic therapy.

Patients are a huge contributor to the overusage of antibiotics. They can help by not asking for antibiotics they don't need. Many times patients are not taking antibiotics as prescribed, especially stopping before the prescription runs out. Many save it for later and self prescribe it. Prescriptions are written to cover the time needed to help our body fight all the harmful bacteria. If you stop it early, the bacteria have not been killed and can restart the infection.

There are many other problems that contribute to the antibiotic resistance. Everyone has to take responsibility before this resistance really gets out of hand.

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