When antibiotics became industrially produced following World War II, our quality of life and our longevity improved enormously. No one thought bacteria were going to become resistant.
The problem of chemotherapy of bacterial infections could be solved neither by the experimental medical research worker nor by the chemist alone, but only by the two together working in very close cooperation over many years.
People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.
It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently.
In learning to utilize antibiotics for the control of human and animal diseases, the medical and veterinary professions have acquired powerful tools for combating infections and epidemics.
I grew up on antibiotics. Every ailment - sore throats, earaches, flus - warranted a trip to the doctor and in most cases some kind of prescription.
Shaking hands is a pretty good way to get yourself sick, not necessarily with Ebola, but with a million other germs that can cause colds and flu.
Why do physicians prescribe powerful antibiotics? Generally not because our patients ask for them. Most people who come in with a sore throat would be just as happy leaving my office with a prescription for Chloraseptic as clarithromycin.
Sick animals can lead to sick people.
It did not seem likely that I was destined to undertake research on typhus.
MRSA, which is a kind of super bug mutant, is killing 10,000 people a year in Britain.
Disease is not the prerogative of man and the domestic animals, so it was quite natural to see if the lower animals, with very simple organizations, showed pathological phenomena, and if so, infection, cure and immunity could be observed among them.
MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is an important cause of healthcare-associated infections.
Some experts say we are moving back to the pre-antibiotic era. No. This will be a post-antibiotic era. In terms of new replacement antibiotics, the pipeline is virtually dry. A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child's scratched knee could once again kill.
Reducing MRSA infections is critical because these bacteria are difficult to treat and are common in healthcare settings, especially among ICU (intensive care unit) patients.
I've been to location shoots in Mexico before, and everyone ends up getting sick.
If at the first sign of infection, you always jump in with antibiotics, you do not give the immune system a chance to grow stronger.
Antibiotics are so pervasive that they are often prescribed preemptively, as soon as patients report symptoms, before a diagnosis is made.
We need to know more about how group A strep interact with humans to cause so many different illnesses.
Most bacteria aren't bad. We breathe and eat and ingest gobs of bacteria every single moment of our lives. Our food is covered in bacteria. And you're breathing in bacteria all the time, and you mostly don't get sick.
In the development of antibiotics, the soil microbiological population has contributed more than its share. It is to the soil that the microbiologists came in search of new antibacterial agents.
If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet - microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.
The more we look at drug resistance, the more concerned we are. It basically shows us that the end of the road isn't very far away for antibiotics.
It has been demonstrated that a species of penicillium produces in culture a very powerful antibacterial substance which affects different bacteria in different degrees. Generally speaking it may be said that the least sensitive bacteria are the Gram-negative bacilli, and the most susceptible are the pyogenic cocci ... In addition to its possible use in the treatment of bacterial infections penicillin is certainly useful... for its power of inhibiting unwanted microbes in bacterial cultures so that penicillin insensitive bacteria can readily be isolated.
Perhaps the most useful lesson which has come out of the work on penicillin has been the demonstration that success in this field depends on the development and coordinated use of technical methods.
