Community Magazine September 2019

94 Community Magazine Peleh the BoyWonder Have You Ever Wondered… How do antibiotics help fight diseases? M ost infectious diseases are caused by bacteria. Infections caused by bacteria can be prevented and treated through an anti-bacterial group of compounds known as antibiotics. Antibiotics are substances that are produced by bacterial sources (micro-organisms) that fight infections by either killing the bacteria outright or by slowing down the growth or development of bacterial cells. Antibiotics came into widespread use during the 1940s. At that time, they were called “wonder drugs,” because they cured many deadly diseases. The number of deaths caused by diseases such as meningitis, pneumonia, and tuberculosis were reduced significantly once antibiotics became available. Today, we have many different types of antibiotics. Some antibiotics are called broad-spectrum , because they can be used for many different types of bacteria. Others are called narrow-spectrum , because they are only effective against a few specific types of bacteria. The type of antibiotic a doctor prescribes to treat an infection depends on the type of bacteria causing that infection. Distinguishing Normal Body Cells from Harmful Bacteria Child Prodigy PelehWunder – more commonly known as Peleh the BoyWonder You may be wondering how antibiotics can kill bacteria in your body without harming your normal body cells. Antibiotics work by affecting things that bacterial cells have but human cells don’t. For example, human cells do not have cell walls, while many types of bacteria do. The antibiotic penicillin works by keeping bacteria from building cell walls. Bacterial cells and human cells also differ in the structure of their cell membranes and in what they use to build proteins or copy DNA. Some antibiotics dissolve the membrane of just bacterial cells, while others affect protein-building or DNA-copying machinery that is specific to bacteria. Fortunate Accident Penicillin, which was the very first antibiotic drug, was discovered by accident in 1928 by Alexander Fleming.