Antibiotics | Health | Biology | FuseSchool

Antibiotics… one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century. You’ve probably taken them at some point during your life… maybe for a throat or ear infection? About 20 doses of antibiotics are prescribed per 1,000 people every day worldwide. That’s the same as 1 in 50 people every day!

So what are antibiotics?

Well it is the name for a group of drugs which are used to treat disease caused by bacteria, and bacteria only. They do not work for anything else, so viruses like colds and the flu can’t be treated with antibiotics.

Bacteria are single-celled organisms which can be pathogenic. That means that they can cause disease in humans and animals and antibiotics can be used to treat these diseases.

In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered the very first antibiotic; penicillin.One day after studying influenza he noticed that mould had accidentally developed on a set of petri dishes being used to grow the bacteria called ‘staphylococcus’. The mould had created a bacteria free circle around itself.

The mould was the fungus penicillium notatum. Fleming concluded that the bacteria on the plate had been killed off by a substance in the mould. Fleming named this active bacteria-killing substance Penicillin.

Other scientists then worked on penicillin further so that it could be produced as a drug, and by the 1940s it was being mass-produced by pharmaceutical companies.So how are antibiotics mass-produced?

There are three methods for making antibiotics.
Naturally - These are made by other microorganisms, such as fungi and other bacteria, like Fleming discovered.They are grown in huge colonies, where the active substance is then extracted.

Synthetic - Some antibiotics can be made completely in the lab.

Semi-synthetic - This method takes naturally occurring antibiotics and then uses lab work to add additional amino acids or groups to slightly change and enhance the antibiotic, to create a new type.

Penicillin was just the start, we now make over 100 different types of antibiotics against different types of bacteria. So how do antibiotics actually work?

Antibiotics affect specific parts of bacterial cells which human cells don’t have, they stop the bacterial infection but don’t harm human cells. This is done in two ways, that antibiotics work: either by stopping the bacteria from reproducing or by killing the bacteria.

Antibiotics do this by inhibiting certain metabolic, or chemical, processes which occur inside the bacteria. For example, they can stop protein synthesis, DNA replication or break down their cell wall. This is why they are not useful against viruses, as viruses are not living organisms and so don’t have metabolic processes that the antibiotics can disrupt. This is why it is very important to check whether an infection is caused by a bacterium rather than a virus before attempting to treat it with antibiotics.

The discovery of Antibiotic is one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century, and has played a huge role in keeping the public healthy. However, bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. This is a major public health threat. Antibiotic resistance is happening through natural selection. In a large population of bacteria, due to genetic variation, some of the bacteria have a natural resistance to the antibiotics. These bacteria survive and reproduce, and pass on resistance so that the whole colony become resistant to antibiotics.



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