Do we have the drugs to combat an epidemic, as the Antibiotic resistivity is on the rise?

Antibiotics and similar drugs, together called antimicrobial agents, have been used for the last 70 years to treat patients who have infectious diseases. Since the 1940s, these drugs have greatly reduced illness and death from infectious diseases. Antibiotic use has been beneficial and, when prescribed and taken correctly, their value in patient care is enormous. However, these drugs have been used so widely and for so long that the infectious organisms the antibiotics are designed to kill have adapted to them, making the drugs less effective. Antibiotic resistance is a type of drug resistance where a microorganism is able to survive exposure to an antibiotic. Many antibiotic resistance genes exist in on plasmids, facilitating their transfer. If a bacterium carries several resistance genes, it is called multi-resistant or, informally, a superbug or super bacterium.

The primary cause of antibiotic resistance is genetic mutation in bacteria. The prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria is a result of antibiotic use both within medicine and veterinary medicine. The greater the duration of exposure the greater the risk of the development of resistance irrespective of the severity of the need for antibiotics. As resistance becomes more common there becomes a greater need for alternative treatments. People infected with antimicrobial-resistant organisms are more likely to have longer, more expensive hospital stays, and may be more likely to die as a result of the infection.

Factors contributing towards resistance include incorrect diagnosis, unnecessary prescriptions, improper use of antibiotics by patients, and the use of antibiotics as livestock food additives for growth promotion. It was in 1947, the first bacterium in which penicillin resistance was found, just four years after the drug started being mass-produced. Methicillin was then the antibiotic of choice, but has since been replaced by oxacillin due to significant kidney toxicity.

The bacterial infections which contribute most to human disease are also those in which emerging and microbial resistance is most evident: diarrhoeal diseases, respira­tory tract infections, meningitis, sexually transmitted infec­tions, and hospital-acquired infections. Some important ex­amples include penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae, vancomycin-resistant enterococci, methicillin-resistant Sta­phylococcus aureus, multi-resistant salmonellae, and multi-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The development of resistance to drugs commonly used to treat malaria is of particular con­cern, as is the emerging resistance to anti-HIV drugs.

When infections become resistant to first-line antimicrobials, treatment has to be switched to second- or third-line drugs, which are nearly always much more expensive and sometimes more toxic as well, for example, the drugs needed to treat multidrug-resistant forms of tuberculosis are over 100 times more expensive than the first-line drugs used to treat non-re­sistant forms. In many countries, the high cost of such replace­ment drugs is too expensive, with the result that some diseases can no longer be treated in areas where resistance to first-line drugs is widespread. Most alarming of all are diseases where resistance is developing for virtually all currently available drugs, thus raising the possibility of a post-antibiotic era. Even if the pharmaceutical industry were to step up efforts to develop new replacement drugs immediately, current trends suggest that some diseases will have no effective therapies within the next ten years. So, do you think we are prepared to handle such a epidemic?