'Should the widespread use of antibiotics continue?'
The first antibiotic, penicillin, went into mass production in 1945 (5) and before this time, antibiotics were not used in medical practice and the majority of bacteria were characteristically sensitive to antibiotics. As these drugs became widely used and they still are, the bacterial resistance to one or more antibiotics has increased so much that antibiotics which were previously widely effective are no longer useful against certain bacterial types. In most cases, antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria is not due to mutation where the protein that the antibiotic attacks is altered. Instead, antiobiotic resistance in nature normally involves the bacteria producing enzymes which target the antibiotic making it inactive.
An important reason why the widespread use of antibiotics should not continue is that if a bacterium becomes resistant to all antibiotics availible and passes on these characteristics, then there could be a worldwide epidemic of disease. On April 28 1994, it was reported that some bacteria in patient samples could resist all currently availible antibiotics (2). In order to prevent this from happening on a massive scale, the use of antibiotics should be kept to a minimum and there should be larger investments into alternative treatments. During 1979-1987, 0.02% of pneumococcus strains were penicillin resistent in 13 hospitals in 12 states and in 1995, the figure had increased to 6.6% (3). This shows how quickly the resistance of a particular strain can widely increase and so action against the use of antibiotics must take place as quickly as possible. An example of the effect of resistant bacteria occured in 1968, when 12,500 were killed in an epidemic of Shigella diarrhea (1). This bacterium was resistant to 4 different antibiotics and was caused by a plasmid which was able to transfer from one bacterium to another. In this way, the resistance is able to spread quickly and cause problems.