Since the advent of modern medicine, millions of people have turned to antibiotics to help fight against different kinds of infection. Infections may be in the form of a simple mouth sore to a post surgerical complication that can be life threatening . Recently, studies have shown that bacteria are growing smarter, evading medical intervention. The fight against bacteria with the use of antibiotics is now becoming a major concern as it can endanger our health, even resulting to death.
According to a medical report from The Lancet Infectious Diseases, researches have found that 39% of 51% bacteria that causes post surgical infection are now resistant to the standard antibiotics being administered by our health and medical professionals. To forecast this evolution of bug resistance, they have calculated that, with the current rate of increasing trend, 30% increase of this type of resistance can lead to an additional 120,000 infections and 6,000 deaths annually in the United States alone.
The study is focused mainly in hospitals but it is believed that the same is happening in other health care facilities such as medical clinics, schools, basically anywhere where pathogens can thrive on - which means susceptible human bodies and moisture.
The director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Ramanan Laxminarayan, and his team of researchers collected data on pre-operative procedures in fighting against infection. These procedures focused on the use of antibiotics prior to surgerical procedures such as prostate biopsies, Cesarean sections and colon surgery, to protect patients from getting these bugs when recovering from surgery. With this, the rate of infection as revealed by the study was three times lower compared to those patients who were not administered with pre-operative antibiotics. They also investigated the infections that did occur post-op and found that about 40% of Cesarean patients with infections were caused by resistant microbes, and 50-90% of infected prostate biopsy patients were traced to antibiotic resistant bacteria.
That's something to think about when you get the strep throat, flu or a skin infection.
