Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria

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Term Paper Title	Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria
# of Words	736
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	2.94

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 that fought penicillin was
called Staphylococcus aureus. This bug is usually harmless ...

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