Talk:Drug resistance

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[edit] Purpose of this article.

I encountered this article while doing cleanup on the "resistance" disambiguation, which unfornunately did not initially have a link to here.I now believe that this article should be converted into a brief overview of the phenomenon, listing the similarities and differences in drug resistance for the different pathogens.

The overarching similarity is evolution by mutation and natural selection. Another similarity: it's a population pnenomenon. An individual bacterium does not become resistant.

Differences:

• precise mechanisms (viruses do not "pump antibiotics out of the cell.")
• cancer resistance is not contagious.

65.184.224.174 19:38, 16 April 2007 (UTC)Will (I did NOT write this. I simply edited a few spelling errors.)

[edit] NPOV

Moved this NPOV stuff to the talk page for cleanup and attribution. This may indeed be a looming public health threat, but it needs a verifiable source to corroborate the statement. Irene Ringworm 18:35, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

In short, the lack of concerted effort by governments and the pharmaceutical industry, together with the innate capacity of microbes to develop resistance at a rate that outpaces development of new drugs, suggests that existing strategies for developing viable, long-term anti-microbial therapies are ultimately doomed to failure. Without alternative strategies, the acquisition of drug resistance by pathogenic microorganisms looms as possibly one of the most significant public health threats facing humanity in the 21st century.

[edit] merger multidrug resistance?

• no. The articles on multidrug resistance and drug resistance should not be merged, because multidrug resistance is a major topic in and of itself (see, e.g., multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis). However, the article on multidrug resistance ought to be cleaned up (or even re-written). 69.143.80.200 03:40, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

• no - drug resistance is common and normally not a public health issue. It is generally a clinical/medical issue, hence doctors choose flucloxacillin to treat staphylococcus aureus infections as it is generally the case now that this bacteria is resitant to the 1st available antiobiotic of penicillin (likewise amoxicillin for urinary tract infection is generally pointless in UK, but urine infection generally easily treatable with many other antibiotics). If the staph proves resistant to flucloxacillin too and needs say fusidic acid then that is a (great) nuisance issue for the individual doctor & patient, but still an easily curable situation. MRSA of course is major problem because multidrug resistant and in extreme forms may be totally untreatable and a public health risk (ie fatal risk to others in hospital). David Ruben ^Talk 00:30, 11 May 2008 (UTC)