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Nisa, on 2011-02-18 11:20:51, said:
I am not a scientist but I don't understand how over prescribing antibiotics is going to cause any bacterial illness to gain strength. I can see how it might make an individual's immune system weaker but not make the bacteria stronger. I am guessing I am missing something because I hear this stated a lot.
If somebody doesn't take all their medication and the bacteria is not fully killed then I can see how that bacteria may treat the antibiotics as a sort of vaccine against the antibiotic. Similar to doctors giving you a safe dose of a specific disease to cause your body to build a resistance to it. So, if somebody was to not kill the bacteria it could reappear stronger and spread to others and in a sense cause a new strain of that bacteria.
But even in terms of not taking all the prescribed antibiotics isn't there still the same chance that the bacteria can spread after it has been attacked by the antibiotics? Clearly the antibiotics don't kill it right off and a normal course of antibiotics is approx. 5-days..
It would just seem logical, in my mind, that bacteria is always going to try to find a way to mutate (as all life does) in order to survive regardless. However I can see how not taking all ones medicine can facilitate this happening.
The above seems like logic to me but again I am not a chemist, scientist or physician and I have heard this kind of reporting many times. Just not sure what I am missing beyond beyond being part of the pharmacological industry that makes incredibly HUGE amounts of money when they come out with a new drug and also get plenty of money handed to them to come up with new drugs if the public/government is convinced a health issue is at stake.
If somebody doesn't take all their medication and the bacteria is not fully killed then I can see how that bacteria may treat the antibiotics as a sort of vaccine against the antibiotic. Similar to doctors giving you a safe dose of a specific disease to cause your body to build a resistance to it. So, if somebody was to not kill the bacteria it could reappear stronger and spread to others and in a sense cause a new strain of that bacteria.
But even in terms of not taking all the prescribed antibiotics isn't there still the same chance that the bacteria can spread after it has been attacked by the antibiotics? Clearly the antibiotics don't kill it right off and a normal course of antibiotics is approx. 5-days..
It would just seem logical, in my mind, that bacteria is always going to try to find a way to mutate (as all life does) in order to survive regardless. However I can see how not taking all ones medicine can facilitate this happening.
The above seems like logic to me but again I am not a chemist, scientist or physician and I have heard this kind of reporting many times. Just not sure what I am missing beyond beyond being part of the pharmacological industry that makes incredibly HUGE amounts of money when they come out with a new drug and also get plenty of money handed to them to come up with new drugs if the public/government is convinced a health issue is at stake.
Essentially, it's an issue of evolution and population dynamics. By stopping the treatment before the fully prescribed cycle, you kill the microbes that are most vulnerable to the medicine, but you leave in place the ones that have some incremental resistance. With the non-resistant microbes now killed, the more-resistant ones come to dominate the population. Since genes for resistance can often jump cross-species, increasing the frequency of resistance genes in entire microbe population raises the chance of that resistance gene appearing in a pathogen microbe.
See a reprint of a Scientific American article on the subject: http://www.chiro.org...esistance.shtml
