My doctor recently prescribed me antibiotics, which I am paranoid about as I have taken a lot recently. Is taking a lot of antibiotics bad for me personally, like I will be less able to fight infection with antibiotics later on?
Or, is it almost like pollution, where people as a whole are just using too much of it for it to be sustainable?
Other way of saying it I guess: Is 5 people taking 1 unnecessary antibiotic each a year the same as 1 person taking 5 unncessary antibiotics a year?
In: 6
You are much more likely to be harmed by antibiotic resistant bacteria that developed their resistance outside your body (as in inside someone else’s body, or in livestock) than inside your body. This is because once resistance develops, it can spread widely because the microbes with resistance are better at surviving than those without resistance.
One thing that I have not seen mentioned yet is that microbes can share genes for resistance with other microbes, not just with their offspring. Many resistance genes are carried on small circular pieces of DNA called plasmids. Microbes can make copies of these plasmids and trade them for their neighbors’ plasmids. This means that antibiotic resistance can spread fast, and it is relatively easy for microbes to pick up resistance genes for multiple antibiotics.
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