Antibiotics are the most important life saving drugs used to cure diseases. The first antibiotic was penicillin, discovered accidentally from a mold culture in 1940s. Today, over 100 different antibiotics are available to treat minor illnesses as well as life-threatening infections. However, the frequent use of antibiotics for long durations or in heavy doses has lead to antibiotic resistant.
Due to this rapidly spreading drug-resistant among bacteria, antibiotics once appeared to be miracle remedy have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Sooner the era of antibiotics is coming to an end. Therefore, it is ultimate necessity to looking of alternates to antibiotics for human and veterinary medicine. This article is intended to introduce to some alternative approaches for curing infections and diseases.
Traditional antibiotics aim to kill or stop the growth of pathogens, but antivirulence drugs prevent disease by neutralizing virulence factors, the specific proteins or toxins that a pathogen uses to establish an infection.
Potentially, antivirulence drugs disarm pathogens rather than kill them and scientists have long thought of such a strategy that could prevent pathogens from developing drug resistance, since antivirulence drugs don’t kill the pathogens while avoiding the pitfalls of drug resistance. Although they could be effective in theory, antivirulence drugs have never been tested in humans, unless most recently in October 2011. The study reported that these drugs have the potential to fight infection.
Other practically more preferred alternates of antibiotics are probiotics and prebiotics, which have been successfully employed for disease cure, without worry of drug resistance. Probiotics are live bacteria supplements which beneficially affect the host health by improving its intestinal bacterial balance. These beneficial bacteria have been part of our food since ever, in the form of yogurt and other fermented foods. Feed these bacteria to either healthy or sick person improves health status and body defense to fight against disease causing infectious agents.
On the other hand, prebiotics are non-digestible food ingredients that beneficially affect the host by selectively stimulating the growth and/or activity of one or a limited number of bacteria in the colon. Prebiotics have also been part of our every day food since centuries.
They are naturally present in many root vegetables, fruits and grains. We recently used prebiotics and probiotics in a stress model, utilizing poultry broilers, which were subjected to heat stress and supplemented with prebiotics and probiotics.
We observed that feeding broilers with prebiotics and probiotics improved growth performance and immunity to fight against infection. As broilers response is comparable with that in human, similar out comes can be expected by feeding prebiotics or probiotics. Therefore, a healthy addition of prebiotics, probiotics foods in our routine diet can assure a healthy token for us.
So the game now is to keep bacteria at bay. Hygiene is an obvious last but not the least option for maintain healthy livability. Better cleaning, hand gels and stern warnings to staff and public alike have helped reduce infection rates in hospitals.
MUHAMMAD UMAR SOHAIL
Lahore
