evidence-bacteria-resis

• Bacteria can reproduce every 30 minutes, which allows them to evolve rapidly.
• In the 1940s, doctors began to treat bacterial diseases using antibiotics such as penicillin.
• Antibiotics kill bacteria, and are widely used in medicine and agriculture to prevent animals from developing bacterial diseases.
• In the last few years, certain strains of bacteria have evolved and are now antibiotic resistant.
• One common strain of antibiotic resistant bacteria is called MRSA.
• In the exam, you could be asked to describe how antibiotic resistance happens.
• A population of bacteria could cause a disease in humans, and in any population of an organism, there will be genetic variation due to mutations.
• A mutation could make a bacterium resistant to antibiotics.
• If an antibiotic is used, all of the bacteria are killed apart from the bacterium that's resistant to antibiotics, allowing the resistant strain to survive and reproduce without any competition from other bacteria.
• Over time, the population of the resistant strain rises and spreads because people are not immune to it and there's no effective treatment.
• Doctors should not prescribe antibiotics inappropriately, as antibiotics have no effect on viruses.
• Patients should make certain to complete that course of antibiotics to ensure that all of the bacteria are killed and none can survive to mutate and form resistant strains.
• Antibiotics should be restricted in their use.
• Researchers are currently developing new antibiotics, but the problem is that this takes a long time and it's extremely expensive, and as new antibiotic resistant bacteria emerge all the time, it's unlikely that we'll be able to keep up.