Antibiotics

by Read Listen Learn

Antibiotics is the name of a group of medicines that can cure infections caused by bacteria. They have saved many lives, but where do they come from?

Antibiotics cure infections because they contain a 'germ against germs' which attacks the bacteria that have given a person a cold or chest infection, for example, but they don't harm the people who take them. Antibiotics are not chemical, they are organic and may come from mould growing on old fruit, for instance.

Human use of antibiotics goes back thousands of years. The Chinese, Egyptians and Greeks all used natural things like spiders' webs or fungus because these had antibiotics in them. Thousands of years ago, they did not understand how this worked but they knew that it did. In England, hundreds of years ago, people would feed mouldy apples to a horse if it had a cough. The mouldy apples contained antibiotics.

Modern medicine did not understand this cure until the twentieth century. The first antibiotic was used in Germany in 1909. It was for syphilis, a serious problem at the time. Next, a British scientist, Alexander Fleming, discovered penicillin when it accidentally grew on some oranges in his laboratory and destroyed the bacteria around it.

In 1939, it was made into a medicine just in time for the Second World War. Wounded soldiers often get dangerous infections like septicaemia and the infection – not the wound itself – kills them. Millions of soldiers in the First World War died in this way. In the Second World War, the British army had access to penicillin (many others did not, including British civilians) so the wounded soldiers who needed it were given the medicine. Far fewer British soldiers died of their wounds compared to the First World War. The new medicine saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

After the war, it quickly became available for almost everybody and it has saved millions of lives around the world. Babies also often die of infection, especially in poor countries but now, with antibiotics, many live to be adults and so the world population is increasing very quickly.

But there is bad news: many bacteria have learned to resist antibiotics and are now much deadlier than before. Many doctors say it is only a matter of time before a super bacteria, which no medicine can stop, travels around the world killing millions. Antibiotics, which have saved hundreds of millions of lives, may one day kill many more, but doctors are now working hard to prevent an epidemic if it ever happens.