Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues

In spite of the effectiveness of these drugs, the ethical dilemmas towards redistribution of antibiotics still continue to remain in many situations between doctor and patient. Due to the increasing risk of contracting superbugs with extended use of antibiotics, doctors have been prescribing their patients inflicted with moderate to severe infections less than the amount needed in order to properly sustain their treatment. In other words, they are refusing to give their patients the drugs they need to survive, therefore endangering their futures and lives at stake due to their infectious disease to stop the exposure to super bugs without their consent. An article on the effects due to overuse of antibiotics states yet another example of an ethical issue, “Also, in order to develop a new drug, there is a lot of testing needed.” This means that there are copious amounts of potentially harmful drugs being given to sick patients in order to help biotechnicians manipulate their product into something worthwhile. While this practice is nothing new to the world of prescription drugs and medicine and that these antibiotics must go through the testing process in order to achieve the final product, there are still many others who do not condone this kind of human testing.

There have been laws made for antibiotics for infectious diseases that are made to keep people safe. There are certain laws that make sure that said patient needs to take a certain amount of antibiotics so that the emergence of superbugs will not occur, because giving a low dosage of an antibiotic can make an organism antibiotic resistant. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) have made laws requesting that food companies not to use antibiotics in their foods because the spread of infectious diseases can be spread through foods, and that superbugs could also come from foods if not treated correctly with the right amount of antibiotics. There have been many cases of superbugs in foods, and the companies that treated their foods with antibiotics are to blame for. Without these laws, more people would have been with an infectious disease, or even die, but with these laws more lives can be saved.

At least 3 out of 10 people who come in contact with pneumonia die before antibiotics are used in their treatment. Without the knowledge of using antibiotics it can cause a great danger among many people around the world. Antibiotics have helped to improve many lives from bacterial infections all around despite different ethnicities or races. Though antibiotics grow more resistant many researchers globally have tried to find new ways to treat them. Even then many antibiotic-centered companies have quit production and the ones are left are on the search for new antibiotics. This is a problem for those who need them in our society today for surgeries and simple scratches to go uninfected.

Globally people need them in treatments, while some refrain from conserving it. Some antibiotics have even grown ineffective and it has been stressed in europe, with another fact that they now have European antibiotic awareness day, to take the antibiotics as recommended to not come across problems. In addition there has been a rise of resistant bacterial infections. Though there is not a clear amount of how many fatal deaths it has lead to around the world but in a 2008 study in Europe union about 25,000 patients have died by these infections caused by multi-drug resistant bacteria. Meanwhile the World Health Organization has stated that there are now four bacterial infections that are passed from humans to animals. Since bacterial infections are caused by social interaction and used on animals for agriculture, it was made possible for them to spread. A permanent solution that has been made is for physicians to optimize the use of antibiotics for the meantime so to prevent any possible antibiotic resistance from occurring.

Time has brought us to think of a post-antibiotic era as we struggle to find more antibiotics for medical and pharmaceutical uses. As new antibiotics are being made a lot more resistance have been following through more quickly. With this knowledge more antibiotics are being demanded to be used only as stated or ridden out of production. Without the use of antibiotics to hold off people in such surgeries, it would lead to more deaths. This would raise the need for more research on medicines and great efforts into finding the cure through other sources, or even vaccines. In order to spread the news, the World Health organization has raised awareness in these bacterial issues on World Health day.

Ethical Issues

Legal Issues

Social Issues

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