What You Need to Know About Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance refers to the situation in which bacteria develop the ability to survive exposure to antibiotics designed to destroy them or to thwart their growth. This means that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are free to continue to grow and multiply, causing infection within the host despite their exposure to antibiotics.

This greatly impacts our ability to treat and prevent diseases affected by antibiotic resistance, increases one’s recovery time, and also increases the length of a patient’s hospital stay.

Antibiotic resistance contributes to more than two million infections and more than 20,000 deaths each year in the United States, according to the CDC. It is increasingly important to be judicious about your usage of antibiotics and to ensure you are being correctly prescribed.

The recent, widespread overuse of antibiotics has played a significant factor in increasing the prevalence of this antibiotic resistant bacteria. We can see this clearly with respect to urinary tract infections (UTIs).

According to an NIH study, there is growing evidence that the UTIs, which afflict millions of Americans a year, mostly women, are increasingly resistant to these antibiotics, turning a once-routine diagnosis into one that is leading to more hospitalizations, graver illnesses and prolonged discomfort from the excruciating burning sensation that the infection brings.

Antibiotics are highly effective in treating UTIs; but if the wrong antibiotic is prescribed, optimal treatment is delayed and the infection can spread into the kidneys or the bloodstream, causing severe illness. UTIs that resist one or more types of antibiotics are increasing and the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in UTI is as high as 38% in US hospitals.

Answers before antibiotics is now a possibility when those microbiology results are available in hours, instead of days. Rapid, accurate, and informed treatment decisions are possible with BacterioScan’s automated rapid diagnostic microbiology platform. PathAdvantage’s embrace and implementation of this technology into their lab environment is delivering rapid and timely results to physicians to ensure that their patients are taking the right medicine for the right infection at the right time.