Multiple antibiotic resistance problem

MRSA strains are a frequent problem in hospital infechon, such strains often showing multiple antibiotic resistance. Furthermore, increased resistance to some... 

Although the pundits will claim that the Golden Age of Antibiotics is long past, the necessity for new agents to combat infectious disease of all types is still with us, and with the massive misuse of potent antibiotics, the microbes that are now major causes of diseases of man (and animals) are rapidly exhibiting multiresistant phenotypes. Perhaps nowhere is the effect of multiple resistance phenotype seen more than in the problems that arise in the treatment of tuberculosis. Most if not all clinical strains are resistant to at least two if not more of the conunonly used antibiotics, and currently, increasing numbers of patients present with strains... 

Antibiotics may be defined as secondary metabolites of micro-organisms. In contrary to primary metabolites (proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids) which play an essential role in the growth and multiplication of cells secondary metabolites are of no importance in that respect. Antibiotics dispose of a relative low molecular mass and the ability to exhibit microbistatic or microbicidal efficacy in/on other microbe species by impairing the cell wall biosynthesis, the cytoplasmic membrane, the oxidative phophorylation. Because of there extremely high antimicrobial activity antibiotics are mainly used as chemotherapeuticals however, some antibiotics are also used in the food industry for the protection of food against deterioration e.g. Nisin (20.11.1.), Pimaricin (20.11.2.). But these applications will be more and more restricted or even completely banned as microbes may acquire resistance which represents a severe problem in chemotherapy with antibiotics. Acquired resistance is a consequence of the selection pressure on a microbe population in the presence of microbicides. Chemotherapy with an antibiotic the application of which has led to the selection of mutant resistant organisms is no longer successful. 

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