Antibiotics and painkillers

• Drugs such as aspirin and paracetamol are useful painkillers
• Painkillers relieve your symptoms (headache, sore throat, etc.) but they do not kill the pathogen
• Antibiotics such as penicillin kill bacteria without harming your own cells
• Antibiotics do not destroy viruses because viruses reproduce inside the cells and it is difficult to develop drugs that can destroy viruses without damaging your body cells
• Strains of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics are evolving - meaning that antibiotics used to kill a particular type of bacteria no longer work
• There are some types of bacteria (e.g. MRSA) that are resistant to all known antibiotics