Strategies to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance

Abstract

On 11th December, 1945, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Sir Alexander Fleming made a prophetic prediction “The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.” In 1947, only three years after starting commercial use of penicillin, his prediction came true; first case of penicillin resistance was documented. If we look at the timeline of antibiotic resistance, we will notice that, antibiotic resistance starts to develop only few years after discovery of an antibiotic. Apparently, only three things in life are certain-death, taxes and infinite ability of the microbes to produce antimicrobial resistance (AMR).