Filed under: health, parenting | Tags: discovery, drugs, health, health care, medicine
One of the greatest discovery ever was the discovery of penicillin. Here’s some cool info on it:
Penicillin is one of the earliest discovered and widely used antibiotic agents, derived from the Penicillium mold. Antibiotics are natural substances that are released by bacteria and fungi into the their environment, as a means of inhibiting other organisms – it is chemical warfare on a microscopic scale. The discovery of penicillin has often been described as a miracle drug, and that is exactly what it was to adalat. Prior to the discovery of penicillin, death could occur in what would seem, today, to be very trivial injuries and diseases. It could occur from minor wounds that became infected or from diseases such as Strep Throat, and venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea were a much more serious issue. When he returned, he noticed a clear halo surrounding the yellow-green growth of a mold that had accidentally contaminated the plate. Unknown to him, a spore of a rare variant called Penicillium notatum had drifted in from a mycology lab one floor below hydrodiuril. Luck would have it that Fleming had decided not to store his culture in a warm incubator, and that London was then hit by a cold spell, giving the mold a chance to grow. Later, as the temperature rose, the Staphylococcus bacteria grew like a lawn, covering the entire plate — except for the area surrounding the moldy contaminant. Seeing that halo was Fleming’s “Eureka” moment, an instant of great personal insight and deductive reasoning. He correctly deduced that the mold must have released a substance that inhibited the growth of the bacteria. The first human trial of penicillin took place in 1941 and involved treating a man with osteomyelitis. Although the treatment produced improvement, the patient, a policeman, died when the limited supply of penicillin was exhausted. (Penicillin was so scarce that the patient’s urine was collected and the excreted penicillin was recrystallized to be used again.) Despite olanzapine the sad ending to this initial penicillin treatment, the therapeutic efficacy of penicillin was accepted. Interest in penicillin soared with the onset of World War II and bombings in England. These events gave great urgency to development of a process which would produce medicinal penicillin in sufficient quantities to treat ever increasing numbers of war wounds. But the British pharmaceutical industry was unable to cope with increasing wartime demands, not only for penicillin but for more traditional medicines, as well.
Filed under: health | Tags: antibiotics, artificial heart, history, medicine
What is the greatest medical discovery of all times? My wife and I were having this debate last night. I argued that the greatest discovery was an artificial heart. My wife believes that the discovery of antibiotics is the biggest medical discovery in history. Which one of us is right?
We both agreed that an artificial heart is truly amazing. You know it wasn’t long ago when people thought that our souls were contained in the heart. We now know for a fact that you keep on being you, even when your heart is made out of plastic and metal. An artificial heart is really amazing to me.
But then my wife pointed out how millions of people are alive today because of antibiotics. She argued that maybe a few hundred people have been saved by artificial hearts, but many million lived longer than they should have because of antibiotics.
My wife is right. Antibiotics are the greatest discovery in medical history. Here’s a nice little story I found on that:
Originally noticed by a French medical student, Ernest Duchesne, in 1896. Penicillin was re-discovered by bacteriologist Alexander Fleming working at St. Mary’s Hospital in London in 1928. He observed that a plate culture of Staphylococcus had been contaminated by a blue-green mold and that colonies of bacteria adjacent to the mold were being dissolved. Curious, Alexander Fleming grew the mold in a pure culture and found that it produced a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. Naming the substance penicillin, Dr. Fleming in 1929 published the results of his investigations, noting that his discovery might have therapeutic value if it could be produced in quantity.
In recent years, resistance to antibiotics has become a real threat to human health. This is because the increasing number of microorganisms that have become resistant to antibiotics are violent and untreatable.
Overuse of a class of antibiotics has led to the development of resistant bacteria. Many strains of bacteria have become resistant to most of the available drugs meant to destroy them. Much of this resistance is due to overuse of antibiotics. About a third of the 150 million antibiotic prescriptions written each year are inappropriate. One study found that as many as 70% of patients with colds and upper respiratory tract infections and other ailments most often caused by viruses (which can’t be treated with antibiotics), were prescribed antibiotics anyway. Some experts in the CDC suggest that eventually, so many bacteria will develop resistance that antibiotics won’t work and hospitals will be filled with people dying from infections, as they were in the 1920s.
