Antibiotics & Painkillers (OCR GCSE Biology A (Gateway Science Suite)): Revision Notes
📚 Revision Notes
3.1.8 Antibiotics & Painkillers
infoNote
Antibiotics are medicines that kill bacterial pathogens inside the body, without damaging body cells. They cannot kill viruses as they use body cells to reproduce, meaning any drugs that target them would affect body tissue too. Painkillers (such as aspirin) only treat the symptoms of the disease, rather than the cause.
- Antibiotics can be taken as a pill, syrup or directly into the bloodstream
- Different antibiotics are effective against different types of bacteria, so receiving the correct one is important
- Their use has decreased the number of deaths from bacterial diseases
- An example is Penicillin The great concern is that bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics.
- Mutations can occur during reproduction resulting in certain bacteria no longer being killed by antibiotics
- When these bacteria are exposed to antibiotics, only the non-resistant one die
- The resistant bacteria survive and reproduce, meaning the population of resistant bacteria increases
- This means that antibiotics that were previously effective no longer work To prevent the development of these resistant strains we can:
- Stop overusing antibiotics- this unnecessarily exposes bacteria to the antibiotics
- Finishing courses of antibiotics to kill all of the bacteria