���������������������������� Antibiotics: What are they and how do they work? Leslie Xia

One day in global class, the teacher starts teaching about the bubonic plague and talks about how it wiped out almost all of Europe and surrounding countries. The bubonic plague was a disease in rats and fleas. Infection in a human occurs when a person is bitten by a flea that has been infected. When a flea bites a human and contaminates the wound with its infected blood, the plague carrying bacteria is passed into the humans tissue. The bubonic plague bacterium then infects a new victim, and the infected humans die in a short period of time. This disease and many others became very fascinating because it caused the deaths of many millions of people and was incurable. It led into questions like: How is it possible to defend ourselves from this today? After much reading and researching, it was interesting uncovering how easy it is nowadays to cure these diseases. Its now cured using one simple way, antibiotics. This led to the question of: What are antibiotics?

Antibiotics are one of the most frequently prescribed medications in medicine in modern times. Antibiotics cure disease by stopping the growth and reproduction of bacteria. It is important to realize that antibiotics only treat bacterial infections. The first antibiotic was penicillin, discovered accidentally from a mold culture in 1928 by Alexander Fleming. Today, over 100 antibiotics are available to all doctors to cure discomforts ranging from minor illnesses to life-threatening infections. Unlike previous treatments for infections, which often consisted of using chemical compounds, antibiotics from microbes had no or very few side effects and a high effective target activity.

Choosing what kind of antibiotics to get is important. The effectiveness of different antibiotics varies depending on different factors. Factors such as the location of the infection, the ability of the antibiotic to reach the site of infection, etc. Some antibiotics automatically destroy bacteria, while others just prevent the bacteria from multiplying. Different antibiotics target different bacteria. Knowledge of what kinds of bacteria cause what infections is needed this way one will be able to choose the antibiotic that best combats those kinds of bacteria. For example, when someone has an earache, the doctor knows what kinds of bacteria caused it� then they�ll know what to prescribe. Antibiotics are applied differently too, for example oral antibiotics are all simply taken by mouth and some antibiotics are administered topically, as with eye drops or ointments. Also, a person may have allergies that might cause them to reject certain types of antibiotics, for example being allergic to penicillin, would prevent your doctor from prescribing amoxicillin.

References:

1. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/antibiotics.html