Antibiotic Resistance: A Neglected Aspect in Clinical Practice

Abstract

To,
The editor,
Drug resistance is an inevitable biological process,
however even though as physicians, we are augmenting
it. After discovery, Nobel Prize winner Alexander
Fleming said, "The thoughtless person playing with
penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death
of a man who succumbs to infection with a penicillinresistant
organism." Most people didn't die of cancer or
chronic lifestyle diseases, because they didn't live
sufficient to develop them. Unfortunately, they died of
infections yet again because of a fact named antibiotic
resistance.1Penicillin was strewn in 1943, as over the
counter drug, thus became resistantonly after two years.
Likewise, recently, Daptomycin, became resistant after
only one year in 2004. Bacteria develop resistance so
quickly that pharmaceutical companies have decided
making antibiotics is not in their best interest, so there
are infections moving across the world for which, out
of more than100 antibiotics available on the market,
two drugs might work with side effects, or one drug, or
none.2In 2008, the Center for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) identified, doctors in Sweden
diagnosed a man from India with a different infection
resistant to all but one drug that time. The gene that
creates that resistance, known as NDM, has now spread
from India into China, Asia, Africa, Europe and Canada,
and the United States. In United States and Europe,
50,000 people a year die of infections which no drug
can help. In the United States, 50 percent of the antibiotics
given in hospitals are unnecessary. In the United States,
possibly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold every year
go to farm animals, not to humans, creating resistant
bacteria that move off the farm in water, in dust and in
the meat of the animals.