Who is responsible for antibiotic resistance? Why?
2007-03-09 09:32:32 · 8 answers · asked by shane200388 1 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Biology
No it is who not what
2007-03-09 09:36:27 · update #1
I think doctors are. As an American I've had my fair share of antibiotic treatments over things that really didn't need an antibiotic. As the patient, I assumed like many do, that my doctor knows what he/she is doing.
Now that I live in the Netherlands I've come to realize that as much as sinus infections suck, you do NOT need antibiotics right off the bat. This goes for several other diagnoses that tend to get immediate antibiotic treatment that the patient could easily do without. Sure they'll be in more discomfort for a little longer, but I'd rather be miserable for an extra day or two than end up desperately needing an antibiotic and having my body not respond to the treatment.
2007-03-09 09:40:37 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋
An antibiotic is a drug that kills or prevents the growth of bacteria. They have no effect against viruses or fungal infections.
Use or misuse of antibiotics may result in the development of antibiotic resistance by the infecting organisms, similar to the development of pesticide resistance in insects. Evolutionary theory of genetic selection requires that as close as possible to 100% of the infecting organisms be killed off to avoid selection of resistance; if a small subset of the population survives the treatment and is allowed to multiply, the average susceptibility of this new population to the compound will be much less than that of the original population, since they have descended from those few organisms which survived the original treatment. This survival often results from an inheritable resistance to the compound which was infrequent in the original population but is now much more frequent in the descendants thus selected entirely from those originally infrequent resistant organisms.
2007-03-09 09:39:56 · answer #2 · answered by ANITHA 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Who? As in a person?
Well, if you wanted you could point a finger at people who take antibiotics for trivial things, and/or don't take them all like they're supposed to. You could point fingers at doctors that overprescribed them. You could point fingers at a lot of people really, but at the end of the day the credit goes to the bacteria. Their very short generation times and HUGE numbers means resistance is inevitable. It's only a matter of time.
2007-03-09 09:40:32 · answer #3 · answered by Geoffrey B 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Doctors who over prescribed antibiotics, particularly penicillin before they knew a patient can build up a resistance to the medication.
2007-03-09 09:40:45 · answer #4 · answered by beez 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
natural selection, the mechanism of evolution. only the microbes which can grow and reproduce in the presence of antibiotics make baby microbes, so more and more of the new microbes inherit their parents' genes and are able to resist antibiotics. it's a natural process, but accelerated by overuse of antibiotic agents - when we use them unnecessarily, we expose more microbes to the harsher conditions, and so they have more reason/opportunity to get tougher. if we used antibiotics less frequently, then resistance wouldn't be as useful a trait, and eventually the microbes would be less resistant.
2007-03-09 09:46:11 · answer #5 · answered by Megs 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Nobody is responsible. The `person in front of me is correct. It is what, not whom.
2007-03-09 09:38:40 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Your penicillin-loving doctor, I'm afraid.
2007-03-09 09:38:30 · answer #7 · answered by Brian L 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Not who, what. That would be evoluton of the bacteria.
2007-03-09 09:35:51 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋