What is Antibiotic Resistance?
The World Health Organisation highlights the global health emergency of antibiotic resistance during World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week 18th-24th November.
What is antimicrobial resistance? The name commonly used in practice by medical professionals for antimicrobial resistance is antibiotic resistance referring mainly to bacterial infections and the antibiotics used to fight them.
“Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites change over time (mutate and evolve) and no longer respond to medicines making infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, sepsis and death.” World Health Organisation
In simpler terms, according to the Center for Disease Control antibiotic resistance happens when germs like bacteria and fungi develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them.
How does antibiotic resistance happen?
Antibiotics destroy the bacteria by one or more mechanisms: damage the cell wall, inhibit protein synthesis, or block bacterial multiplication by inhibiting the DNA replication. Over the last decades the bacteria mutated and acquired the capacity to render antibiotics useless. Fungi and viruses have similarly developed resistance against anti-fungal or antiviral medication.
Antibiotic resistance is a global health emergency surpassing the Covid pandemic by multiple orders of magnitude.
What does it mean for us?
This seems like a very abstract concept, but sadly it has staggering implications for all of us. It results into infections that are extremely difficult to treat or control and the recent exponential growth of sepsis cases leading to death or to life changing handicaps.
Sepsis is a global health crisis. It affects between 47 and 50 million people every year, at least 11 million die – one death every 2.8 seconds. Depending on country, mortality varies between 15% and more than 50 %. Many surviving patients suffer from the consequences of sepsis for the rest of their lives. https://www.global-sepsis-alliance.org/ In the UK annually, there were 55,000 deaths due to sepsis and over 60,000 people left with life altering handicaps.
“Antibiotic resistance: the other pandemic lurking behind Covid 19“ – British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy
“In the UK 45% of bacterial infections are resistant to the main classes of antibiotics“ – Welcome Trust, British Medical Journal
Antibiotics are vital for healthcare, they support hospital interventions, surgeries and cancer treatments. Without antibiotics we will go back to the dark days where people were routinely succumbing to common infections.
We urgently need new types of antibiotics, but there are none available as it can take at least a decade to develop novel antibiotics.
We have all directly or indirectly experienced situations where antibiotics do not work even when taken repeatedly, especially in cases of Urinary tract infections. We are left with few answers and serious side effects like yeast infections, damage to our gut bacteria supporting our immunity, and organ damage.
While antibiotics are still the current ‘standard of care’ we must explore non antibiotic solutions that help address infections. Natural alternatives can help common conditions like UTIs while avoiding antibiotic resistance.
In line with the NHS guidelines recommending to avoid antibiotics overuse, Uralix offers a natural alternative that helps support bladder function while clearing symptoms and maintaining long term urinary health.