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Natural Health News Articles
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| Posted: 7th August 2004 |
| Antibiotic |
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In common usage, an antibiotic is a drug that kills bacteria. Antibiotics are among other "antimicrobial" drugs, including anti-virals that kill viruses, anti-fungals that kill fungi, as well as other antimicrobials that kill worms or any other intracellular or extracellular parasite, but which is generally relatively harmless to the host and is used to treat infection. The term was originally used to describe only formulations derived from living organisms but is now also used in reference to partially or wholly synthetic antimicrobials such as the sulfonamides.
Side effects
Side effects range from slight headache to a major allergic reaction. One of the more common side effects is diarrhea, which results from the antibiotic disrupting the balance of intestinal flora, the "good bacteria" that dwell inside the human digestive system. Other side effects can result from interaction between the antibiotic and other drugs, such as elevated risk of tendon damage from administration of a quinolone antibiotic with a systemic corticosteroid.
Antibiotic misuse
Common forms of antibiotic misuse include taking an inappropriate antibiotic, in particular the use of antibacterials for viral infections like the common cold, and failure to take the entire prescribed course of the antibiotic, usually because the patient feels better before the infecting organism is completely eradicated. In addition to treatment failure, these practices can result in antibiotic resistance.
Antibiotic resistance
One side effect of misusing antibiotics is the development of antibiotic resistance by the infecting organisms, similar to the development of pesticide resistance in insects. Evolutionary theory of genetic selection requires that as close as possible to 100% of the infecting organisms be killed off to avoid selection of resistance; if a small subset of the population survives the treatment and is allowed to multiply, the average susceptibility of this new population to the compound will be much less than that of the original population, since they have descended from those few organisms which survived the original treatment. |
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