Time to be a Hypochondriac

In our third year of our pharmacy degree we have a course on chemotherapy that gives us an introduction to bacteria, viruses and the medicines we have available to treat them. It has made more aware of how many types of bacteria there are and how difficult they are to treat as they are almost ‘organised’ organisms as they mutate, evolve and resist our medicine. When antibiotics first emerged it was a break-through in curing people with illnesses caused by bacteria but now it seems that resistant strains are making effective medicine obsolete and we are running out of new ones. 

I have noticed in recent media that health organisations are starting to urge pharmaceutical companies to increase research and development of new antibiotics. From what I have read/been told, pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to invest in antibiotic research because of low profit margins. This is because antibiotics will only be used until the patient is cured rather than drugs that are used continuously such as inhalers and anti-hypertensives.

It is easy to forget our battle with those tiny organisms as they don’t usually affect our lives unless we contract colds and flu. When I have hospital visits it is apparent that there is an issue with superbugs. Some causes of resistance is overusing and overprescribing of antibiotics when they are not needed and they shouldn’t be used for prophylaxis. Even though these could be to blame I think resistance would occur eventually. 

It is almost ridiculous that we could be faced with incurable bacterial infections and we will say ‘once, we were able to cure bacterial disease!’ It seems that eradication of malicious bacteria is near impossible and maybe I’ll wash my hands a second or third time from now on.