Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria

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Term Paper Title	Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria
# of Words	714
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	2.86

Antibiotic Resistance in Bacteria

Antibiotic Resistance in Bacteria

     For about 50 years, antibiotics have been the answer to many bacterial
infections. Antibiotics are chemical substances that are secreted by living
things.  Doctors prescribed these medicines to cure many diseases.  During World
War II, it treated one of the biggest killers during wartime - infected wounds.
It was the beginning of the antibiotic era.  But just when antibiotics were
being mass produced, bacteria started to evolve and became resistant to these
medicines.
     Antibiotic resistance can be the result of different things.  One cause
of resistance could be drug abuse.  There are people who believe that when they
get sick, antibiotics are the answer. The  more times you use a drug, the more
it will decrease the effect it has on you.  That is because the bacteria has
found a way to avoid the effects of that antibiotic.  Another cause of
resistance is the improper use of drugs.  When patients feel that the symptoms
of their disease have improved, they often stop taking the drug.  Just because
the symptoms have disappeared it does not mean the disease has gone away.
Prescribed drugs should be taken until all the medicine is gone so the disease
is completely finished.  If it is not, then this will just give the bacteria
some time to find a way to avoid the effects of the drug.
     One antibiotic that will always have a long lasting effect in history is
penicillin.  This was the first antibiotic ever to be discovered.  Alexander
Fleming was the person responsible for the discovery in 1928.  In his laboratory,
he noticed that in some of his bacteria colonies, that he was growing, were some
clear spots.  He realized that something had killed the bacteria in these clear
spots, which ended up to be a fungus growth.  He then discovered that inside
this mold was a substance that killed bacteria. It was the antibiotic,
penicillin.
     Penicillin became the most powerful germ-killer known at that time.
Antibiotics kill disease-causing bacteria by interfering with their processes.
Penicillin kills bacteria by attaching to their cell walls.  Then it destroys
part of the wall.  The cell wall breaks apart and bacteria dies.
     After four years, when drug companies started to mass produce penicillin,
in 1943, the first signs of penicillin-resistant bacteria started to show up.
The first bacteria ...

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