Antibiotics Flashcards
What are antibiotics?
Medicines that help cure bacterial diseases by killing infective bacteria in the body.
Penicillin is an example.
Why don’t antibiotics affect viruses?
Viruses stay inside host cells and are not living cells.
What are the advantages of using antibiotics?
They have greatly reduced the number of deaths from infectious bacterial diseases.
What is antibiotic resistance?
When bacteria become resistant to the antibiotic - caused by mutations.
What is an example of a superbug?
MRSA.
What are the problems with antibiotic resistance?
It means the resistant bacteria will be able to survive and produce genetically identical copies which are also resistant to the antibiotic.
How do you prevent antibiotic resistance?
Doctors should avoid over-prescribing antibiotics.
Patients should complete their course of antibiotics to ensure all bacteria are killed.
