Antibiotic resistance has become a serious problem since they are greatly misused. This is due to its purchase over the counter in many countries like ours and it being taken in sub optimal doses or the course not being completed. We are in a grave situation. Read on to know more.

    Team@CMHF

IT MAY not be too early to start writing an obituary for the era of antibiotics.

For decades, we have lived in blissful ignorance of the infectious diseases that tormented earlier generations. Just take a pill, or get a shot, and they will go away. But the miracle drugs are starting to fail, even for common diseases – and we have ourselves to blame.

Consider gonorrhea, a nasty sexually transmitted disease which is now heading toward the point of breakout. This month, scientists announced that a Japanese sex worker had a case of the disease that was highly resistant to the antibiotics that are currently the last line of defense. At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that gonorrhea in the United States is showing signs of decreased susceptibility to those same final-resort antibiotics.

“Untreatable gonorrhea may become a reality in the U.S.’’

Gonorrhea is already fairly common in America, with more than 700,000 new infections annually. If untreated in women, it can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, and even infertility. Men, too, can be left infertile. Gonorrhea can also spread to the blood. It can be fatal.

We can hope for a new medicine, but antibiotic development is not an area of great interest to Big Pharma. And if nobody devises a new treatment regimen in time, then gonorrhea will become super-gonorrhea. The number of cases will explode, and the vicious complications will move from rare to common. A scourge would come roaring back.

How did this happen? The driving forces are Darwin and human carelessness. Bacteria are constantly evolving, adapting to the changing conditions they face. Antibiotics usually kill bacteria. But sometimes bacteria will develop a biological defense – particularly if too small a dose is used. Gonorrhea bacteria have proven especially adept at developing defenses, for reasons that remain mysterious.

But we have also hastened gonorrhea’s progress, says Dr. Stuart Levy, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine and president of the “Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics.’’ There was a time when penicillin, the original miracle drug, would cure gonorrhea. But it was not used carefully, and eventually, in brothels during the Vietnam War, a resistant strain arose and spread around the globe.

In many parts of the world, antibiotics are available without a prescription, which means that they are widely misused; giving our invisible enemies more chances to develop resistance.

Ref:  http://articles.boston.com/2011-07-24/bostonglobe/298103821gonorrhea-antibiotic-development-infections