Antibiotics are commonly known as penicillin or any of the various other names.
Antibiotics should only be used
against a bacteria and not a virus. The common cold, flu (influenza), earache
and bronchitis are caused by a virus and not bacterial.
Antibiotics do nothing
against a virus.
Many times someone with the flu will
get antibiotics, so you wonder why are they getting antibiotics if the flu is a
virus. Because the flu can turn into pneumonia and pneumonia is usually caused
by a bacteria, that’s why it is treated with an antibiotic. The pneumonia is
being treated with the antibiotic, not the influenza.
An illness such as meningitis can be
either. It can be viral caused by a virus or it can be bacterial caused by a
bacteria. Bed rest for viral and antibiotics for the bacterial. This is why you
have to clean any cuts you get, if bacteria gets in the cut, you can get a
bacterial infection and for that you would need an antibiotic like penicillin.
For too many years now, doctors have
been prescribing antibiotics for everything like cold, flu, sore throats and
earaches to children. Doctors should know better even when parents insist the
doctor write out a prescription. The only sore throat that needs to be treated
with antibiotics is strep. In a study done by Harvard Medical School “Health
officials estimate that just between 15 percent and 36 percent of children with
sore throats actually have strep. If the study's findings hold true for the
entire population, that means between 1.3 million and 2.8 million children with
sore throats are getting antibiotics unnecessarily each year.”
So how does this affect all of us?
Think of your body as a corporation with its bosses and departments. When your
body is invaded by a bacteria or virus your body takes note of this. Your
immune system will look at it and decide how best to fight it and then it goes
into fighting it. Your body also keeps a record of this. It files what it saw, how
it fought it and what it fought it with and puts this into your body’s computer
database. Each time someone tries to invade your company the boss yells out to
look into the database and if it is something that has invaded before, they go
to the warehouse and get what worked last time.
That is called the immune system.
When you get sick your body will try and find a way to get rid of the invader
and it will file away all the information for later use. That is what building
up your immunity means.
This is how a vaccine works, it shows
your body a possible invader and your body looks at it and decides how to fight
it and stores the information into the database and the weapons to fight it go
into the warehouse for possible use. Now your body didn’t have to do much
because vaccines are dead virus cells, but your body certainly took note and
filed it away. If later in the season this invader shows up full force, your
boss is going to call out to look it up in the database and go to the warehouse
and get out the proper ammunition so your body can fight this, because it had
the information already filed away.
At some point you get a cold or the
flu and your body sees this invader as a threat. You as the owner demand a
lawyer, Mr. Penicillin, to take care of this virus invader right now, the
lawyer says he cannot do anything about it that you need to fight this
yourself. You tell him to get to work, but since this is a virus, penicillin is
totally ineffective. Since you get better, the next time you call on Mr. Penicillin
again. What really made you better was that your white cell department went to
work making more white cells, which fight infections and viruses so your body
on its own fought back the viral cold or flu.
Every time you ask for penicillin
when it’s not needed, you weaken your body’s ability to use penicillin the next
time. These bacterial invaders are not stupid either, every time they come
across an antibiotic like penicillin they take note of this as well and store
it in their own database, making themselves stronger and more resistant to
penicillin the next time, and that’s why we are getting so-called super bugs
today.
More of these super bacterial
infections that the normal penicillin used to fight off don’t work any more,
because the bacteria have learned, adjusted and changed into more powerful
bacterial infections. An example is MRSA, which stands for methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus, a staph infection that has become antibiotic resistant.
That is how the overuse of
antibiotics has hurt all of us. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t taken a lot of
antibiotics over the years; the bacterial bugs are changing into super bugs
because everyone has taken so many antibiotics. And if one of these super bugs
tries to invade you, a normal antibiotic might not work. Super bugs now call
for super antibiotics.
The over prescribing of antibiotics
is one major cause of this, so is eating antibiotics in our food. Animals are
given antibiotics to ward off and treat bacterial infections in them so they
can be healthy enough for slaughter and sold for food such as beef, chicken and
pork. We are ingesting antibiotics this way as well, unless you buy antibiotic
free meat.
Not all bacteria are bad for us.
Throughout human evolution our bodies have come into contact with bacteria and
our body’s have learned from this. This has built our immune system, our body’s
database. Getting rid of all bacteria is not a good thing and that is why the
overuse of antibiotics and even the overuse of antibacterial soaps have not
been healthy for us.
Over prescribing antibiotics drives
up health care cost, limits antibiotics effectiveness and when over prescribing
to kids it puts them at risk for any other side effects as well.
Note: The word
antibiotic has been normally associated with antibacterial drugs such as the
family of penicillin drugs. Recently there have been developments with
antiviral antibiotics that treat some types of viral infections.
© 2009 Sam Montana
Resources:
Mayo Clinic
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