• Question: when was the first anti biotic prescribed

    Asked by calm to Daniela ?, ☣ Danna, Jonny, Juan, Lindsay on 10 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Juan Ortiz

      Juan Ortiz answered on 10 Jun 2016:

      INTRODUCTION

      Antibiotics were discovered by the Scottish scientist ALEXANDER FLEMING in 1928. At that age people were aware that tiny creatures called bacteria could cause diseases in humans.

      In order to study the bacteria, Fleming started to grow a lot of them in special plates with food to keep them happy, but accidentally a fungus (another tiny creature) got into the plates. This was Fleming’s mistake because he wasn’t supposed to let this fungus in, but he observed that the FUNGUS WAS KILLING ALL THE BACTERIA!!.

      Then he thought “WOW, maybe WE CAN USE THIS FUNGUS TO CURE ILL PEOPLE by killing the bacteria infecting them!!”

      It turned out that this fungus could produce a poison that was deathly for bacteria but harmless for humans. This was called PENICILLIN. Then other types of these poisons were discovered and started to be sold to cure diseases and called ANTIBIOTICS.

      ANSWER:

      It is difficult to know when the first antibiotic was prescribed. However, the first that we have knowledge of is called PRONTOSIL and started to be sold and prescribed by doctors in 1933.

    • Photo: Danna Gifford

      Danna Gifford answered on 10 Jun 2016:

      The first reported cure of an infection with penicillin is 25 November1930, when a doctor named Cecil George Paine in Sheffield used it to cure a type of eye infection that happens in babies. Before this, he had tried to use it to treat a man’s beard infection, but it didn’t work. So the first prescription of an antibiotic was probably sometime around then.

      As Juan mentioned, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. But it took a long time for some other researchers (Florey, Chain, and Heatley) to figure out how to make enough of the stuff to give to people. Before that, penicillin was being produced by growing fungus in whatever buckets they could find, and the drug was so valuable, it was actually being recovered from the pee of people it was given to (gross, no—but I’d rather have that than an infection)!

    • Photo: Jonathan Hunter

      Jonathan Hunter answered on 10 Jun 2016:

      I’ll check Wikipedia and get back to you! But the other have already answered this question very well.

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