Using drugs to treat disease.
Lesson objectivesTo describe the difference between
painkillers and antibiotics.To explain that antibiotics only kill bacterial
pathogens.
Describe how you feel when you are ill.
Medicines.
• Some drugs have no effect on the pathogens and just ease the symptoms.
• Remember aspirin just reduces pain it does not stop the cause.
Antibiotics
• These drugs actually target the pathogens.
• People use antiseptics and disinfectants to kill bacteria outside the body but these are far too poisonous.
• They would kill our cells and the pathogen.
Antibiotics
• Antibiotics have really changed how we treat infectious diseases.
• Alexander Fleming studied bacteria wanting to find ways of killing them.
• However, he was a sloppy scientist.
Alexander Fleming
• When he came home from a holiday he notices most of his cultures had mould growing on them.
• However, some had a clear ring around the mould.
• He investigated this and discovered penicillin although he failed to make a stable version.
Ernst Chain and Howard Florey
• They managed to produce penicillin on an industrial scale and saved many lives in the Second World War because of this.
• Antibiotics kill bacteria by damaging the cells without harming our own cells.
• Antibiotics have helped cure diseases such as plague and TB.
Problems
• Antibiotics do not kill viral diseases, and finding drugs that do, has been very difficult.
• Why is this?
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