GLOBAL ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE CRISIS-Dr.Kalonga,AE.

Antibiotics and similar drugs, together called antimicrobial agents, have been used for the last 70 years to treat patients who have infectious diseases. Since the 1940s, these drugs have greatly reduced illness and death from infectious diseases. However, these drugs have been used so widely and for so long that the infectious organisms the antibiotics are designed to kill have adapted to them, making the drugs less effective.

 Antibiotic / Antimicrobial resistance is the ability of microbes to resist the effects of drugs – that is, the germs are not killed, and their growth is not stopped. Although some people are at greater risk than others, no one can completely avoid the risk of antibiotic-resistant infections. Infections with resistant organisms are difficult to treat, requiring costly and sometimes toxic alternatives.Bacteria will inevitably find ways of resisting the antibiotics developed by humans, which is why aggressive action is needed now to keep new resistance from developing and to prevent the resistance that already exists from spreading.

 How Resistance Happens and Spreads?
The use of antibiotics is the single most important factor leading to antibiotic resistance around the world.Simply using antibiotics creates resistance.  These drugs should only be used to manage infections.

• Antibiotics are among the most commonly prescribed drugs used in human medicine and can be lifesaving drugs.  However, up to 50% of the time antibiotics are not optimally prescribed, often done so when not needed, incorrect dosing or duration.
• The germs that contaminate food can become resistant because of the use of antibiotics in people and in food animals.  For some germs, like the bacteria Salmonella and Campylobacter, it is primarily the use of antibiotics in food animals that increases resistance.  Because of the link the between antibiotic use in food-producing animals and the occurrence of antibiotic-resistant infections in humans, antibiotics that are medically important to treating infections in humans should be used in food-producing animals only under veterinary oversight and only to manage and treat infectious disease, not to promote growth.
• The other major factor in the growth of antibiotic resistance is spread of the resistant strains of bacteria from person to person, or from the non-human sources in the environment (EVOLUTION OR BIO-TERRORISM?).

Some resistant infections cause severe illness.  People with these infections:

• May require increased recovery time,
• Tend to incur increased medical expenses, and/or
• May die from the infection.

The lack of an incentive to do the right thing is hard to correct. In some health-care systems, doctors are rewarded for writing prescriptions. Patients suffer no immediate harm when they neglect to complete drug courses after their symptoms have cleared up, leaving the most drug-resistant bugs alive. Because many people mistakenly believe that human beings, not bacteria, develop resistance, they do not realize that they are doing anything wrong.
  Doctors want to save the best drugs for the hardest cases that are resistant to everything else. It makes no sense to prescribe an expensive patented medicine for the sniffles when something that costs cents will do the job.
Reserving new drugs for emergencies is sensible public policy. But it keeps sales low, and therefore discourages drug firms from research and development. Artemisinin, a malaria treatment which has replaced earlier therapies to which the parasite became resistant—and which now faces resistance problems itself—was brought to the world not by a Western pharmaceutical company, but by Chinese academics.

"He who conceals his disease cannot expect to be cured."

                       ~ Ancient African Proverb.