Antibiotics & other medicines

• Antibiotics can be taken as a pill, syrup or directly into the bloodstream
• Different antibiotics are effective against different types of bacteria, so receiving the correct one is important
• Their use has decreased the number of deaths from bacterial diseases
• An example is Penicillin

• Mutations can occur during reproduction resulting in certain bacteria no longer being killed by antibiotics
• When these bacteria are exposed to antibiotics, only the non-resistant one die
• The resistant bacteria survive and reproduce, meaning the population of resistant bacteria increases
• This means that antibiotics that were previously effective no longer work To prevent the development of these resistant strains we can:

1. Stop overusing antibiotics- this unnecessarily exposes bacteria to the antibiotics
2. Finishing courses of antibiotics to kill all of the bacteria

How Antibiotics Work:

Bacteria are single-celled organisms with structures and cell processes that are different from those of human cells.

Antibiotics work by disrupting these bacterial cell processes, such as:

• Cell wall formation: Some antibiotics, like penicillin, prevent bacteria from building strong cell walls, which causes the bacterial cells to burst and die.
• Protein synthesis: Other antibiotics interfere with the production of proteins in bacterial cells, which stops them from growing and multiplying.
• DNA replication: Some antibiotics stop bacteria from replicating their DNA, preventing them from reproducing.

Why Antibiotics Don't Harm the Host:

Antibiotics target specific features of bacterial cells that are not present in human or animal cells. For example:

• Human cells do not have cell walls, so antibiotics that target bacterial cell walls do not affect the host's cells.
• The machinery used by bacteria to make proteins (ribosomes) is different from that in human cells, so antibiotics can specifically target bacterial ribosomes without harming human cells.

Why Antibiotics Don't Work on Viruses:

Viruses are different from bacteria. They are not living cells and do not carry out processes like protein synthesis or cell wall formation on their own.

• Viruses reproduce by hijacking the host cell's machinery, so there are no bacterial-like processes for antibiotics to target.
• Because viruses live inside host cells, using antibiotics would not affect the virus without harming the host's cells.