Assignment:
You must be thinking right now, what is a superbug? Is it a ten foot tall mutated form of a flying two-headed cockroach? Actually, you cannot see superbugs with the naked eye. Superbugs have come about by way of overuse and abuse of antibiotics and yet the term still sounds like a cheap Hollywood Science-fiction horror flick.
Have you ever wondered how antibiotics actually work? They can differentiate your human cells from bacterial cells. Penicillin prevents bacterium from building a cell wall; animal cells do not have cell walls. The first antibiotic (penicillin) was discovered in the 1920s by Alexander Fleming. It wasn't until the 1940s that it was commercialized.
The delay was caused by difficulty in producing appropriate quantities. By the time it was commercialized, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was identified as resistant. In fact, when accepting his Nobel prize, Fleming cautioned the scientific community on antibiotic resistance. In 1959, resistant Shigella showed resistance to tetracycline. In 1962, MRSA was found to be resistant to methicillin. This same bacteria developed resistance to linezolid in 2001, vancomycin in 2002, and ceftaroline in 2011. Ceftaroline was only on the market for one year before resistance was identified. According to the Center for Disease and Control (CDC), 23,000 deaths have been caused by antibiotic resistance (CDC, 2018). Visit the CDC web page for detailed information about antibiotic/antimicrobial resistance. c
Take a Side
Should antibiotic use on livestock be restricted? Furthermore, discuss the societal impact of antibiotic resistance.