Now, I'm going to get to bacterial resistance. I'll cover these topics. This is just an outline: the Historical, News media (I said something about that already), Mechanism of antibacterial action (I think you'll find that kind of interesting if you're not familiar with it), Definition of the terms and so on and so forth. I'm not going to go through each one of these. I will as topics come up.

Bacterial resistance to drugs has always been an issue for therapy. But in fact bacterial resistance to penicillin, occurred naturally before we even introduced penicillin as a therapy in human medicine. Because there are organisms such as Penicillium notatum in the environment and produce this antibiotic in the soil, there is a natural selection going on. It's an advantage for an organism to kill off creatures in its immediate surroundings so it can have a selective advantage to get more food. Microbiologists have shown that organisms isolated and frozen back in the twenties--well before we ever introduced penicillin as therapeutic agents -- were already producing enzymes (beta lactamases) that would actually destroy penicillin. That's just an enzyme that hydrolyses beta-lactams. Penicillin is called a beta-lactam that is a type of structural class; therefore the enzyme is called a beta-lactamase. Many organisms produce these enzymes. However new agents were developed that were effective against many of these organisms. Then, in the sixties, the Surgeon General at that time said, "It's time to close the book on infectious diseases and concentrate on more pressing medical problems." Now, I've singled out the Surgeon General here but by no means was he by himself.

In fact, a lot of pharmaceutical industries believed it as well and cut back on their programs. However, in 1977, the first penicillin resistant Strep. pneumoniae was isolated and then regarded as an oddity. The response was we've got one. So what? Well, they've become much more alarming. In the eighties we had an outbreak in South Africa. More recently we've had a few outbreaks within this country in two or three locations. However the major difference at present is that the organisms

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