The Cat Vet

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Location: Houston, Tx, USA

An aging boomer considering a lateral move into the leisure sector

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Antibiotic use and misuse

Why in the world are veterinarians and human physicians so worried about antibiotic misuse?
Its because bacteria will develop resistance to known antibiotics when those antibiotics are ingested for too short a time.
See, bacteria are not killed all at once. Usually the weaker bacteria die first and if you just use the antibiotics for a few days rather than the prescribed course the stronger bacteria will live and reproduce stronger bacteria. That is how resistant bacteria form.
Some antibiotics don't even kill bacteria, they just keep the bacteria from reproducing more bacteria. If the antibiotics are not in your system long enough for the original bacteria to die off then the bacteria will go back to making more bacteria.
Even worse than that, some bacteria who hang around with resistant bacteria exchange DNA and become resistant to antibiotics before anybody even uses those particular antibiotics against the formerly susceptible bacteria.
Its a bad situation. If you talke to anybody over about sixty five years old they can tell you what life was like before antibiotics. Not pleasant. Life with resistant bacteria is not pleasant either.
The take home lesson is TAKE YOUR ANTIBIOTICS FOR THE PRESCRIBED TIME. We need some kind of slogan like 'don't mess with Texas' or 'only you can prevent forest fires'

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