ANTIBIOTICS AND CLEANING PRODUCTS
A BRIEF BACKGROUND ON THEÂ ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE/ ANTIBIOTICS
Antibiotic-resistant has been around longer than one may think; dating back to 1928 there have been publicly available antibiotics and not long after that there was bacteria.
The first publicly available antibiotic was Penicillin discovered by Alexander in the 1920s. Antibiotics are essentially bacteria killers, and no matter the way they kill the bacteria, whether that be the collapse of a cell membrane or the shut down of reproduction, antibiotics kill all bacteria including the beneficial bacteria. Bacteria is in a constant state of evolving because of the relatively low reproduction time; with some bacteria being able to reproduce every 15 minutes (Antibiotic Resistance, 2015). As displayed by the chart to the left it did not take long (about 12 years) for bacteria to develop resistance to penicillin, so one could assume that bacteria are extremely efficient at adapting to harmful substances. And, yes, one would be right in that assumption, in fact, a test was run with up to 1000 times the amount of antibiotic a tradition stain of E. coli could survive and still, the bacteria were able to mutate to a point where they could survive in such conditions. This is all possible because of the way in which the bacteria reproduce, binary fission, and the abundance of offspring that bacteria can have in a short period of time ("Antibiotic resistance," 2018). In the same vein, cleaning produces allow for the strongest bacteria to live. Recently, bacteria have become resistant to triclosan, a common compound found in household antibacterial cleaning supplies, and each of the bacteria that were resistant to triclosan was also found to be resistant to quinolone antibiotics (University of Birmingham, 2017).
OVER CLEANLINESS AND OVER CONCERN
People are misinformed on how to use antibiotics and in what use case they are most effective. This has caused the misuse of antibiotics, in turn, there have been a lot more resistant strains of bacteria. As a matter of fact, about 30% of prescribed antibiotics are unnecessary ("About Antibiotic Prescribing, "n.d.) Likewise, people are using cleaning agents to frequently and unnecessarily; the overuse of said clean agents is producing Antimicrobial resistant bacteria like wildfire.