Fighting disease - drugs

• What are painkillers?

  Drugs that relieve pain, don’t actually tackle the cause of the disease, they just help to reduce the symptoms .
• Why do antibiotics work differently?

  They actually kill the bacteria causing the problem without killing your own body cells. Different antibiotics kill different types of bacteria, important to treated with right one.
• But antibiotics don’t destroy viruses e.g flu or cold).
• Viruses reproduce using your body cells which makes it very difficult to develop drugs that destroy just the virus without killing the body‘s cells.
• Use of antibiotics has greatly reduced the number of deaths from communicable diseases.
• What can bacteria do?

  Mutate, this can cause them to be resistant to an antibiotic.
• If you have an infection, some of the

  bacteria might be resistant to antibiotics, when you treat the infection, only the non resistant strains will be killed.
• The individual resistant bacteria will survive and reproduce, and the population of the resistant strains will increase.
• What does the resistant strain cause ?

  Could cause a serious infection that can’t be treated by antibiotics.
• How would we tackle strains?

  To slow down the rate of development of resistant strains, important for doctors to avoid over-prescribing antibiotics.
• Also important that you finish the whole course of antibiotics and don’t just stop once you feel like it.
• Some of the chemicals which plants produce can be used as drugs to test human diseases or relieve symptoms .
• A lot of our current medicines were discovered by studying plants used in traditional cures.
• What is aspirin?

  Used as a painkiller and to lower fever. Developed from a chemical found in willow.
• What is digitalis?

  Used to treat heart conditions. It was developed from foxgloves.
• How was penicillin discovered?

  Clearing petri dishes containing bacteria. One of them had mould on it and area around the mould was free of bacteria.
• Penicillium mould was producing a substance that killed the bacteria.
• Most new drugs are made in the pharmaceutical industry - they’re synthesised by chemists in labs.
• How might the process of drugs start

  Might still start with a chemical extracted from a plant.