Essay on Micro-Organisms and Antibiotic Resistance
Submitted By jayans1975
Words: 3308
Pages: 14
Qualification: Graduate Diploma in Infection Control and Prevention
Course number: 7508
Assessment number: 7
Student number: 27011767
Course tutor: Elsie Truter
Submission date: 04/07/2014
1st submission/re-submission: Re-submission
Word total: 3398
One of the greatest problems that the world at large and the health care system of the world and especially the health care system of New Zealand suffering is the antibiotic resistance between microorganisms. Antibiotics are medicines used to kill or slow down the growth of bacteria that causes infectious diseases (Department of Health, 2014). Antibiotics are used to treat and prevent infectious bacterial diseases in humans and in domestic and food-producing animals. If bacteria become resistant the antibiotics become ineffective. Penicillin is the first antibioticdiscovered by Alexander Fleming in1928. Penicillin is used as an antibiotic drugfor many years and it helped to control the widespread occurrence of a disease. This drug is very effective against bacteria’s if prescribed it properly. But, the situation is changed after a long period of its usage. This continuous usage of drug leaded to a worse condition, which was the development of drug resistance against this particular antibiotic (Centre for disease control and prevention, 2013). Moreover, there were some other condition which increased the transmission of resistant bacteria to another organism was misuse of antibiotics and poor infection control practices (World Health Organisation, 2014). In the US 2 million people are infected with antibiotic resistant infection, with at least 23,000 deaths (CDC, 2012). Even though there are problems associated with resistance of microorganisms, these can be however easily solved through effective implementation of antibiotic stewardship program. When defining antibiotic stewardship program, it is a program in any health care sector such as hospital which is actually designed to improve the way of using the prescribed antibiotic drugs and to reduce the spread of infection. In New Zealand the burden of resistant organisms is not as problematic in comparing with other high burden countries, but studies on the resistance pattern demonstrates that the antibiotic resistance will be a great concern in the future. So, it is a favourable situation in New Zealand to halt the progress of resistant organisms and to promote effective antibiotic usage. (Thompson,2013).The topic under discussion is the antimicrobial resistance, its transmission between organisms and also evaluates the effectiveness of antimicrobial stewardship program in New Zealand healthcare settings and also in other countries.
As antibiotic resistance is a part of resistance to prescribed antibiotic drugs where in some minor category of bacterial species become resistant to some antibiotics or in extreme cases they turn to be superbugs that is multidrug resistant, that condition leads to the spread of a number of contagious diseases globally. Most of the bacteria become resistance either by intrinsic or by acquired resistance. In intrinsic resistance, the bacteria naturally develop resistance against the antibiotic and all the strains in that species are coded by the resistant strain. The mechanism named acquired resistance occurs when a bacteria gain resistance against particular antibiotic agent to which it was previously susceptible (Engelkirk & Engelkirk, 2011). The acquired resistance is occurs through two processes they are mutation and horizontal gene transfer. Mutation is a spontaneous change that occurs in the DNA structure of a particular gene within a species which results in the transformation of the gene where antibiotics act. The replication of the mutated gene results in the formation of a new gene which is different from the former one. This results in the inactivation of the antibiotic (Black, 2005). One in one million to one in ten million cells is the rarest
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