Everything you Need to Know about Antimicrobial Resistance

Ever since the first antibiotic penicillin was discovered, doctors have prescribed antimicrobials and antibiotics to treat a variety of diseases. For the most part, these medicines have done their jobs very well, but due to the common use of these drugs today, microbes are adapting. They are becoming resistant to said drugs, posing health risks to individuals all over the world.

This phenomenon of microbes being resistant to drugs and their action is known as antimicrobial resistance. It greatly reduces our ability to fight against certain life-threatening diseases, with a lack of effective treatment the primary cause for concern.

What causes AMR?

Antimicrobial resistance can be brought about by a variety of changes that occur within microbes. The methods of bringing about these changes can be vast, ranging from genetic mutation, selective pressure, and phenotypic changes, to gene transfer from other microbes.

Picking up genes from other microbes that are resistant to a certain drug makes the existing microbe resistant as well. This factor multiplies, causing a large scale drug resistance in microbes. Germs always look for ways to resist and survive new drugs. With them sharing their resistance with one another, it is becoming extremely hard for us to keep up with what is happening.

What does AMR lead to?

Antimicrobial resistance leads to a lot of medical issues within patients. These are brought about directly and indirectly by the resistance phenomenon. One long-term concern is that AMR might even lead to an era where antibiotics and antimicrobials do not work anymore, and we live in a post-antimicrobial era.

AMR can lead to-

· Infections staying for longer in the body, and getting hard to control

· Subsequent longer stays at the hospital, leading to economic losses and discomfort

· A chance of infections becoming fatal

· Communication of diseases

Drug resistance can have a terrible impact on medical health as we have it today. If it takes the full form that medical professionals dread, it might make menial infections and injuries untreatable, to which simple cures have been found in the 20th century and after.

For instance, a person suffering from non drug-resistant TB will take about 6 months to recover, with daily treatment. On the contrary, drug-resistant TB is much harder to treat, with close supervision and higher time period of medication required.

Antimicrobial resistance represents a prospective problem for the medical sciences of today. If we do not find a solution to this problem, it might end up blowing up in our faces.