by Carol H. Morgan

Created on: April 30, 2008   Last Updated: June 10, 2008

The good news about antibiotics is that they have caused a revolution in modern medicine over the past century. The long night of human beings' subjugation to tiny microscopic organisms has broken finally. Where earaches, earaches, toothaches, broken bones and minor scratches could once carry the same serious risks to chances of survivability as could heart attacks, strokes, gunshot wounds and car accidents, with the world-changing health care technology of antibiotic medication we don't need to be under the constant threat of infections and the pain, death and disfigurement microbial infections can cause.

But there is unfortunately still a bit of bad news. Because antibiotics have led this revolution in health care they now seem to be such an automatic part of any treatment regimen that they are often over used - even in cases where they have no therapeutic benefit. The current challenge now that we all rely on the miraculous boon that these medicines have been to health care, has become to use them judiciously, only as cautious physicians would recommend, and of course only when they will actually help. If we don't practice this restraint, we risk increasing more frequent incidents of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains that could one day reverse the great forward strides that medicine has taken to ensure our freedom from the many horrors of microbial disease.

HISTORY OF ANTIBIOTIC MEDICINE

Crude forms of antibiotic treatments have been used for thousands of years, taken initially from such sources as frog droppings and sulfur. Some early scientists like Louis Pasteur had by the beginning of the twentieth century postulated the link between microbes and disease, knowing then that the key to treating many illnesses would be eventually finding a mechanism to treat them medicinally and not just by preventing infection by pasteurization.

The true power of the antibiotic weapon was harnessed when that mechanism and an antimicrobial substance was discovered. British scientist Alexander Fleming in 1928 discovered nearly by accident that a waste product of mold had a powerful bacteria-killing property. He named the mold that fell into his bacteria culture Penicillium Notatum (or penicillin). He gave a juice made with the mold to infected mice, which were able to overcome their illnesses with few side effects (in other words, no healthy cells seemed to be harmed, and harming microbes without harming the body's cells had been the main problem in many precursory treatments

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