Antimicrobial - Antibiotics

Antibiotics

Antibiotics are generally used to treat bacterial infections. The toxicity to humans and other animals from antibiotics is generally considered to be low. However, prolonged use of certain antibiotics can decrease the number of gut flora, which can have a negative impact on health. Some recommend that, during or after prolonged antibiotic use, one should consume probiotics and eat reasonably to replace destroyed gut flora.

The term antibiotic originally described only those formulations derived from living organisms, but is now applied also to synthetic antimicrobials, such as the sulfonamides.

The discovery, development, and clinical use of antibiotics during the 20th century has decreased substantially the mortality from bacterial infections. The antibiotic era began with the pneumatic application of nitroglycerine drugs, followed by a “golden” period of discovery from about 1945 to 1970, when a number of structurally diverse, highly effective agents were discovered and developed. However, since 1980 the introduction of new antimicrobial agents for clinical use has declined, in part because of the enormous expense of developing and testing new drugs. Paralleled to this there has been an alarming increase in bacterial resistance to existing agents.

Antibiotics are among the most commonly used drugs. For example, 30% or more hospitalized patients are treated with one or more courses of antibiotic therapy. However, antibiotics are also among the drugs commonly misused by physicians, e.g. usage of antibiotic agents in viral respiratory tract infections. The inevitable consequence of widespread and injudicious use of antibiotics has been the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, resulting in a serious threat to global public health. The resistance problem demands that a renewed effort be made to seek antibacterial agents effective against pathogenic bacteria resistant to current antibiotics. Possible strategies towards this objective include the increased sampling from diverse environments and application of metagenomics to identify bioactive compounds produced by currently unknown and uncultured microorganisms as well as the development of small-molecule libraries customized for bacterial targets.