Concerns About the Emerging Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance is when bacteria mutate and adapt so that certain antibiotics no longer affect them. This means that the bacteria that cause certain diseases cannot be treated anymore and it can lead to longer hospital visits or life threatening consequences. Before talking about antibiotic resistance in class, I did not realize it affected so many people and figured it only applied to MRSA strains. The article from before says that at a minimum 2.8 million people are affected annually by bacteria that has become antibiotic resistant and that of those 35,000 die each year. This information was very shocking to me because I knew it was becoming an issue but I did not realize that it was on that large of a scale already.

I wanted to find out more about these drug resistant strains of bacteria so I decided to look into superbugs. Superbugs are strains of certain bacteria that have gained immunity against multiple types of antibiotics and one example is MRSA, which is a strain of Staph aureus. The article says that the bacteria are becoming superbugs because of the over prescription of antibiotics and that the bacteria can share the resistant traits they picked up with other bacteria. This means that more superbugs will be created over time and that it will be harder for the human population to fight them off until eventually no antibiotics work anymore. This is quite concerning because antibiotics can be lifesaving especially for children or older individuals and more people will probably begin to die.

Then I decided to look into what areas of the healthcare field were improperly prescribing the most antibiotics and how it is impacting the world. Apparently, countries with poorer healthcare systems are the most affected and India prescribes the most antibiotics improperly.  The article says that dentists are one of the top abusers of antibiotics and that they prescribe around 10% of all antibiotics and between 30 and 50% of that is unnecessary. I had no idea that antibiotics were even prescribed by that many dentists and that they could prescribe them without even making sure that it is needed. The article says that many dentists prescribe it for endodontic infections when it has been proven not to work which means that instead it is destroying the other bacteria within our body, which makes them become more resistant. This was quite surprising that there is proof that antibiotics do not work on these type of infections and yet dentists still proceed to prescribe them to their patients. Overall, I have learned that taking antibiotics when you do not know for sure what you have is not good because then you could be helping to contribute to the growth of antibiotic resistance.