Paper Topic:

Treatment of drug resistant Infections ( e.g.FED, Resistant TB, MRSA, VRSA)

Treatment of Drug-Resistant Infections

The ?-lactam antibiotics - the penicillins and the cephalosporins - target penicillin-binding proteins , or PBP 's , which are present in all bacteria (Petri , 2001 . However ?-lactam antibiotics cannot kill or inhibit all bacteria due to various mechanisms of bacterial resistance One method is by bacterial destruction of ?-lactam antibiotics enzymatically . Resistance could also be attributed to structural differences in penicillin-binding proteins

The existence of penicillinase-producing bacteria gave rise to the penicillinase-resistance penicillins , such as methicillin , nafcillin oxacillin , cloxacillin and dicloxacillin . The use of these penicillinase-resistant penicillins

are supposed to be limited to the treatment of infections that are known or suspected to be caused by staphylococci that elaborate penicillinase (Petri , 2001

MRSA . Some staphylococci , however , are resistant to the penicillinase-resistant penicillins through acquisition of an additional high-molecular-weight PBP via a transposon from an unknown organism (Petri , 2001 . This PBP has a very low affinity for all ?-lactam antibiotics . The gene encoding for this new PBP is present in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus , or MRSA (Petri , 2001

Treatment of infections due to MRSA can depend on the type of tissues involved and where the infection was acquired . For example , skin and soft-tissue infections are said to represent the majority of the community-associated MRSA disease burden (Daum , 2007 . For wounds where cultures are positive for community-acquired MRSA , patients are given clindamycin , trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole or doxycycline (Grayson , 2006 . al antibiotics such as mupirocin , retapamulin , and bacitracin - with or without neomycin and polymyxin - may also be given (Daum , 2007 . This is because MRSA infections...

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