Not so long ago, during late childhood, I remember catching the common infection known as strep throat. Common in school-age children, strep throat is a sore throat so bad, it’s painful to swallow. Luckily, it’s fairly easily treated, with the administration of antibiotics, such as penicillin. Indeed, a few days after taking the antibiotic, my symptoms were gone.

No need to take the rest of the sickly, pink, nasty medicine, right? If my strep throat is cured, why should I take the next 6 daily dosages?

To my discontent and amid much whining, my mother forced me to take it for the next week, despite my insistence that I was ‘all better’.

Thank goodness.

Doctors prescribe antibiotics to people with bacterial infections. In a oversimplified explanation, the antibiotics kill the evil bacteria. After most of the bacteria are killed, your symptoms go away, and your body can beat the rest of the bacteria into submission. After all, your body’s immune system is a powerful thing. It just needed a little antibiotic help.

So why should you take the antibiotics for the length of time they are prescribed? The answer is antibiotic resistance. If you stop taking the antibiotics, the body has won, but the straggling remainders of the bacterium army pack up their things and leaves the losing battlefield. However, like any sane solider, they remember the mistakes of the past. Tactics for the next big battle are ftormed from past mistakes. In other words, the bacterium remember the army of antibiotics they fought, and that memory is saved when the bacteria next reproduce or mutate.

The end result is bacterial mutations that are resistant to certain antibiotics. Next time someone gets strep throat, the common antibiotic prescribed to cure it may be ineffective. If only you had taken your prescribed antibiotics for the entire length of time, all the bacteria would have been killed, with no wounded soldiers bringing home the message of antibiotics. Which means now this poor person has to suffer.

Strep throat isn’t as dangerous as some bacteria. What about E. coli, the bane of the food industry, or Enterococcus, a bacterium that can lead to meningitis? If bacteria carrying a drug resistant gene is dangerous, what about bacteria that has more than one drug resistant gene, or is multi-resistant?
The term coined is “superbug”, and a superbug could cause the worse epidemic since the black plague of the dark ages.

Since the discovery of penicillin and its application in the 1940’s, saving the lives of millions of soldiers in WWII, antibiotics have become part of our lives. Able to whisk away disease and infection, people have become cavalier in the way they use antibiotics, leading to drug-resistant strains.

Take the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus. Originally, this bacterium, the most common cause of Staph infections, was easily treated by all sorts of antibiotics, including penicillin. S. aureus can cause many conditions, ranging from boils or abscesses to life-threatening diseases such as pneumonia, or meningitis.

Now S. aureus is one of the most drug resistant of bacteria, with strains resistant to all of the ‘cillins” from Penicillin to methicillin. MRSA or methicillin resistant S. Aureus is the most common. Last resort drug Vancomyicin, a powerful antibiotic, is now often being used to treat drug resistant strains. But our last resort may soon also be useless, as a few cases of Vancomyicin resistant bacteria have been found (VRSA).

Of course, our problem with drug resistance doesn’t stem only from people giving up on their antibiotics before the time is up. Everything we use is loaded with antibiotics in small quantities, from antibacterial soap to chicken nuggets. Many farm animals are fed mass quantities of antibiotics to keep infection and disease low among farm animals living in conditions that invite disease.

With the discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics, and the success of using them, humanity began to believe we had vanquished the army of bacteria. In reality, our overuse and misuse of precious antibiotics is only strengthening the army.