Antibiotics – the good and bad
Here at the offices of Childhealth we want to become famous. Not in a skimpy outfit Miley Cyrus way, more a Nobel Science kind of way. So we have scattered old petri dishes around accidentally spilling stuff into them. You see this is how Alex Fleming became famous. One Friday morning in 1928 this geeky scientist stumbled upon a forgotten petri dish covered in bacteria. He also noticed some mould. What he did next changed medicine forever. Instead of throwing it out he placed it under the microscope and noted that around the mould, bacteria had disappeared. The name of this mould was penicillin. He was Knighted and won the Nobel prize for discovering antibiotics.
Antibiotics along with vaccination have saved billions of lives. But they only treat bacterial infections. They have no role in the viral infections that are currently rife this time of the year. The cautious use of antibiotics prevents unnecessary side effects and also lessens the individual emergence of resistant bacteria. They have their place, but they should be carefully prescribed.
So far my experiment has failed. I spilled a bit of coffee and yeast (beer), into a petri dish, and left it over the weekend hoping to find a cure for these viruses. I had already named it ‘QurQolds’. Marketing genius I thought. But I neglected to tell the cleaners. Place was spotless. If those buggers get my Nobel Prize, I might have to consider a skimpy outfit. For more information click here.
