New research warns penicillin 'becoming obsolete'

Melanie Lofgren
10/2/09
3:05 p.m.

Recent studies have proven that penicillin is becoming out of date. Bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. This means that antibiotics are useless and cannot rid the body of common diseases and infections. Doctors are concerned that there is not enough research going on right now in search of new antibiotics. Dr. Kathleen Holloway of the World Health Organization told CNN that “research and development of new antibiotics isn’t keeping up with development of resistance”. Penicillin is becoming ineffective in developing countries, France, Spain, and Romania. In other countries nurses are handing out prescriptions, pharmacists are selling antibiotics without a doctor’s prescription, and doctors are misreading symptoms and handing out antibiotic prescriptions for a viral infection. In order to get on top of this issue, Elias Mossialos who is a professor of health policy at LSE, suggests governments need to give pharmaceutical companies incentive to develop new antibiotics, governments need to start an international fund that would invest in the early stages of antibiotic R&D and governments need to encourage continuing medical education, especially in developing countries.

I think this is a very serious issue. Mossialos states, “Antibiotic resistance is a much more important issue than swine flu and it will only grow worse.” I agree with Mossialos, we need to start by educating those in other countries that you cannot simply hand out these drugs. Then we need to start funding and researching. Dr. Holloway states that this is a global problem. She explains that there are children with drug-resistant TB and there are no drugs to treat them. Doctors today understand this infection and know how to treat it but it is scary to think that it is untreatable because we have overused antibiotics and infections are not responding to them anymore. This can be a very scary issue in the future if we do not start funding and researching today.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/01/antibiotic.penicillin.resistance/index.html