Lamprophony: Your weekly Power-packed quote corner...

In the sick room, ten cents' worth of human understanding equals ten dollars' worth of medical science.
- Martin H. Fischer

Do we have enough drugs to combat an epidermic?

For 70 years doctors have used antibiotics and similar drugs to treat patients with infectious diseases. These drugs have been used for so long making the drugs less effective! This is termed as Antibiotic Resistivity. If a bacterium gets resistant enough, then it might become a superbug or super bacterium causing a plague—this is a problem that all of us need to be concerned about!

From personal experience, a doctor once prescribed me two consecutive anti-biotics for my ear infection. the first two antibiotics didn't work, only the third dose worked! Well, if this is the case, then think of other infectious diseases! As resistivity becomes more common there becomes a greater need for alternative treatments as well. Patients infected with antimicrobial-resistant organisms are more likely to have a long and expensive hospital stay, and may even die as a result of the infection.

Factors contributing towards these resistance may include incorrect diagnosis, unnecessary prescriptions, improper use of antibiotics by patients etc. One of the mass produced antibiotic Penicillin, is no longer used because its simply not effective anymore! That should tell us something.

When infections become resistant to the usual drugs, then the expensive ones need to be administered, which are sometimes more toxic as well. For example, the drug to treat multi-resistant form of tuberculosis is over 100 times more expensive than the normal drugs used to treat non-resistance forms. This might transform to the fact that diseases might spread in third world countries, as their health care is weak.

If the pharmaceutical companies were to develop new replacement drugs immediately, the current trends suggest that some diseases will have no effective therapies within the next ten years. If this continues, then we might not even have any more drugs to combat a biological attack or even a major flu outbreak!



Here is a video interview from Dr. Robert Gaynes MD of Emory University School of Medicine, where he discusses the issue of Preventing Antibiotic Resistivity.

Hi, Bonjour, Namaste!

My name is Gokul, a pre-medical student, here in Austin College, Sherman, Texas. I'm also an international student from India. My intended major is Business and my minor is Computer Science. Now you may think this a little weird for a pre-med student to have as major and minor. But, I think Business Administration and Computer Science go hand in hand with Medicine. Hence, I will be blogging about how computers and medicine intertwine together to make our lives better. Through this blog, I wish to erase the common mindset of people that doctors are supposed to handle virus like Ebola, H1N1, etc. and not viruses like Trojan horses! Finally welcome to my blog!

Here is my Podcast Ad:
MeduComp Ad by gmani7