drugs

• Some drugs relieve the symptoms and some treat the disease
• The medicine which relieves the symptoms of a disease don’t help cure the problem because the pathogens causing the damage will maintain there
• antibiotics treat the disease by directly killing the bacteria or stop more growth.
• Antibiotics only help treat bacteria (NOT VIRUSES)
• Antibiotics can’t treat viruses because they hide in our cells 
• Most antibiotics treat specific types of bacteria hence why you need to be tested before being prescribed.
• Antibiotic resistance is when bacteria become resistant to antibiotics
• Bacteria are able to reproduce quickly so if one cell survives, it can multiply rapidly and spread the resistance gene to other bacteria
• Antibiotics are drugs that can kill bacteria

  An example of an antibiotic is penicillin
• Penicillin kills bacteria by stopping them from making their own cell walls which causes them to burst
• If someone doesn't finish their course of antibiotics then there will be some bacteria left alive which may develop resistance to the drug
• When an antibiotic is used for a long period some types of bacteria become resistant to it meaning it doesn’t kill them. As they adapt to it
• Random mutations can occur in the dna of a bacteria changing their characteristics. Occasionally bacteria become less affected by the antibiotic (resistant)
• Superbugs are very dangerous as they cannot be treated with any antibiotics
• Superbugs are strains of bacteria that have developed resistance to most or all antibiotics
• The bacterias that become resistant and survives replicate rapidly and form a new colony of resistant bacterias which all have the gene for antibiotic resistance. Which is called an antibiotic-resistant strain.
• As the antibiotic aren’t effective anymore the person is still infected with the resistant bacteria and can pass it onto other people
• People with bacterias which are antibiotic resistant need to be prescribed with a different antibiotic which is likely to work and kill the bacteria
• Occasionally some of the bacteria will develop resistance to the new antibiotic growing a new colony. This process can repeat until the bacteria is resistant to loads of types of antibiotics, this is called a superbug (e.g. MRSA) 
• As we use so many antibiotics resistance is bound to arise. Most antibiotics are given to farm animals in the food of healthy animals preventing them getting ill and to make them grow faster making antibiotics more resistance.
• Antibiotics don't cure viral infection as they only target bacteria not viruses
• Taking antibiotics when you don't really need them increases your risk of developing antibiotic resistance
• A solution being done today is developing new antibiotics that work against the resistant strain that is difficult and slow