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Overuse Of Antibacterial Household Products Creating Superbugs

by Medindia Content Team on Oct 11 2007 4:27 PM

According to health experts, antibacterial products are best avoided for daily household chores and personal ablutions. The experts leave out health care personnel for obvious reasons. Medical specialists are beginning to realize the folly of modern life’s dependence on antibacterial household products. According to them, these products may be unintentionally creating germs that are resistant to antibiotics, and that eventually, antibiotics may not be able to slow the spread of these types of germs and diseases.

For many years, antibiotic drugs have worked so quickly and so effectively that they seem magical. Antibacterial molecules inhibit or disrupt the action of enzymes in an unwanted germ’s cell wall. There is no doubt that antibiotics have changed the world. People in the developed world do not succumb to diseases the way they used to many decades back. Antibiotic compounds have been around for over 60 years, and have cured so many people so quickly that for long the term "miracle drug” has seemed most appropriate.

But now the miracle drug seems to be demanding its pound of flesh. Some germs, by the random chances of genetic mutations, survive the action of antibiotics. As they reproduce their offspring, the next-generation germs, get the resistance genes and are themselves resistant to the antibacterial agent.

According to alarmed scientists, the process of germs mutating in such a way that antibacterial chemicals do not affect them anymore is a classic example of evolution and natural selection. So it is very evident that pricey and well-packaged antibacterial soaps and cleansers that customers pick off supermarket shelves are in fact, selecting the toughest, most resistant germs for reproduction.

Hence as Charles Darwin himself might agree with, the more we can rely on ordinary soap, solvents, and our own immune systems to keep away germs, the less we'll have to rely on lucky finds in nature to beat them.

Source-Medindia
ANN /J


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