AllseeingI- you hit the nail on the head. Very rarely do we question words and their meanings. The true meaning of the word antibiotic is: anti-against, biotic-life. Hence the word itself means against life. How many millions of people have been duped into believing antibiotics will cure them. One of the biggest lies in history IMHO.

Please specify what it is exactly you are atlking about.

"So called" Super bugs are commonly strains of pathogenic bateria. Previously treatable with antibiotics. None yet are resistant to all or cocktails of all available treatments.

H5N1 is a virus which kills birds (hence bird flu). It has been known to infect humnas via the foecal oral route and has caused death or serious injury in very healthy subjects (not normal flu virus victims) in very very low numbers.

There are far more virulent viruses than H5N1, Marburg Virus, or any of the other viral haemorrhagic fevers for instance.

Vaccines prepare the body to fight the desease organism in advance of exposure.Whether that be a virus or a bacterium

Antibiotics are commonly used to prevent secondary infection, to prevent that you die of something else not the primary infectious agent. They can of course be used to fight primary infection due to immunosuppressive treatment or injury or just plain pathogenic infection.

Please be specific in what you are trying to say.

The thread deserves to be explored as you are touching on aspects of human development and or evolution etc .. Try and sort out your argument a little first though.

Try "when man control his environment is natural selection still in operation" hows that !!..

Enjoy....

Antibiotics are not for "viruses," because a virus is protein capsule of RNA or DNA, a semi-nonliving/semi-living thing, that can be dormant for many years.

A germ, a bacteria, is not a "virus," because it is a one-celled living organism, has "Ribosomes" in it, a "cellular wall," and other characteristics that make it suseptible to an antibiotic.

There is as time, and place, or most things.

I have had more than one infection that would not leave my body until I had intravenous antibiotics inside the hospital.

But I do agree that both viruses and germs mutate. But the way, reasons, mechanism of action, etc., between the two, are very different.

Usually, when germs, bacteria, mutate, it is, indeed, a primative survival mechanism. A very efficient one.

When viruses mutate, it is usually because of an error in replication. Especially, at least, when it comes to HIV. In a case like that, with active viral suppression from oral medications, failure to take those medications consistently, better than 95% of the time, results in enough viral replication to precipitate viral mutation. And then suddendly the patient is unable to use those medications anymore.

With antibiotics, generally, over-use, misuse, and abuse, are what brought on the bacterial, germ mutations.

I do agree that that ABUSE and OVER-USE of antibiotics has caused these mutations, but only in the bacteria, the germs, not the viruses.

It is only referred to as "super-bugs" in reference to germs, bacterias. That term, "super-bugs," doesn't mean "viruses." I cannot explain with this is so, but after 24 years as a RN, I think that bit of useless trivial was somehow programmed into my feeble brain.

[edit on 5/29/2007 by rm8471]

A virus cannot be cured by taking antibiotics. Antibiotics are only used to treat bacterial infections and the misuse of them contributes to the ever growing problem of resistance. Taking antibiotics when you don't need to can actually cause harmful side effects and you can build up a resistance to a certain antibiotic when you have a virus. Then when you actually get a bacterial infection that needs treatment it will be much harder to cure. So, never take antibiotics for a virus unless you are co-infected with a bacterial infection at the same time (a secondary infection as Deharg pointed out).

There are two primary types of antibiotics that can be divided down further...Natural and Synthetic. Some of the naturally occuring antibiotics included Penicillins that are harvested from a type of mold called Penicillium that typically grows on bread. However, I would not eat the moldy bread because this particular treatment is harvested from certain chemicals found in penicillium called "penicillins". There is also another mold which can be harvested to make the antibiotic Cephalosporin. The specific use of any antibiotic in the penicillin family is to destroy the cell wall which is found in certain species of plants but not in humans or animals (we do not have cell walls). Most forms of bacterial infections DO have cell walls and this is why antibiotics work so well. They will not destroy your own cells because you do not have cell walls for them to destroy, however, they do attack bacterial infections because most bacteria have these walls.

Also, there are certain antibiotics that work in different ways such as Sulfanilamides or what is commonly referred to as "Sulfa". These antibiotics work completely differently than mold grown treatments, and Sulfa is a man made compound. They do not actually kill the bacteria, but instead stop it from growing further by blocking the process by which bacteria produce new DNA to create new bacteria.

So, as you can see just from the few that I listed, there are many ways that bacterial infections can be treated effectively using antibiotics. There are others and if you want more information look up some of the following:

Trimethoprim-Sulfamethoxazole
Aminoglycosides
Quinolones
Nitrofurantoin
Polymyxin
Tetracyclines

These will give you a good starting point to do some research on antibiotics and find out why they work the way they do, and to understand that a good percentage of the time it is the result of antibiotic misuse that causes them to not work properly...not because the antibiotic is harmful to your health itself.

Keep in mind that there are deviations in treatments as pertaining to bacterial, fungal, and viral infections. We currently do have antibiotics for some fungal infections as well, but they behave completely different than a bacterial medicine. Most forms of Fungi cells closely resemble the inner structure of an animal cell than an plant cell, and they work by disrupting the workings of the cell itself (almost like Sulfa for bacterial infections), so treatments such as Nystatin, Azoles, Fluconazole, Ketoconazole, and Amphotericin all work in a similar fashion.

Now, there are antiviral antibiotics avaliable, but they are only prescribed in certain cases where a viral infection is with you for the long term such as HIV/AIDS. Most Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors such as Triazidothymidine, better known as AZT, are some of the better known antivirals and work by blocking specific points along the lifecycle of the virus (specific enzymes called "Reverse Transcriptase") in this case. Others, such as Protease Inhibitors or Entry Inhibitors such as Fuzeon work by blocking other specific enzymes. Once a virus enters the body we can do little else than just let it run its course and in rare exceptions for longer term infections prescribe Antiviral therapy medications. Since we humans have no medication to currently slow down a virus, we effectively have no way to speed the process up either. Take the common cold virus. All you can do is wait for your immune systems response to the virus and for you body to start producing virus free mucus membrane surfaces. This process usually takes around 4 days to complete, but because of the rate at which a cold virus continually infects the new mucus membrane you typically won't get over a cold for around 2 weeks.

Remember, as I stated before, the misuse of antibiotics widely contributes to the reason people build up a resistance to them...such as using them to treat viral infections. Currently we have nothing that can actually "cure" a virus.

[edit on 29-5-2007 by Jazzerman]