Antibiotic misuse Antibiotic misuse Antibiotic misuse, sometimes called antibiotic abuse or antibiotic overuse, refers to the misuse or overuse of antibiotics, with potentially serious effects on health. It is a contributing factor to the development of antibiotic resistance, including the creation of multidrug-resistant bacteria, informally called "super bugs": relatively harmless bacteria (such as staphylococcus, enterococcus and acinetobacter) can develop resistance to multiple antibiotics and cause life-threatening infections. Antibiotics have been around since 1928 when penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming. In the 1980s, antibiotics that were determined medically important for treatment of animals could be approved under veterinary oversight. In 1996, the
Antibiotic resistance in gonorrhea the "parC" gene which encodes for the topoisomerase IV. Topoisomerase IV acts similarly to DNA gyrase and is involved in unwinding DNA for replication. Ceftriaxone and cefixime are third generation cephalosporins and are often used as treatments for "N. gonorrhoeae infections". The cephalosporins are part of a larger beta-lactam family of antibiotics. The newly discovered H041 strain of "N. gonorrhoeae", originally isolated from a commercial sex worker in Japan, was shown to be resistant to this antibiotic. The possible mechanisms of resistance to this antibiotic are as follows: Tetracyclines are a class of antibiotics that inhibit protein synthesis by binding