Question

Describe the actions a person may take to avoid bacteria becoming antibiotic resistant.

Answer 1

To never interupt a antibiotic course of treatment pre-emptivly. This is the biggest "No-No".
Don't throw away antibiotics carelessly, if they get into let's say a lake, at the bacteria might react to it and mutate to resistant to that type of bacteria.
If you need more, i'd be happy to obligde.

Answer 2

Exuras is right about not interrupting a course of treatment pre-emptively. The treatment has killed some, but not all, of the bacteria which caused the disease. The ones which are left are the ones which were more resistant to the drug and stopping the treatment enables them to go on living.

But I have never heard of disposal of antibiotics being involved with development of resistence.

Answer 3

I might have drawn hastey conclussions, but India is the biggest producer and exporter of Antibiotics due to it's insanely cheap pricing about 1/50 of manufacturing price in Sweden. you can find antibiotics at far above physiological margins in their water. I.e Ciprofloxacin (widespectrum antibiotics) 28,000-31,000μL/L.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19226301
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110407/full/news.2011.218.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1473309911700597
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099%2810%2970143-2/abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21881561
http://www.pfigueiredo.org/medicamentos.pdf

Answer 4

Thank you for the links.

It's funny that you should talk about 'supply side' water contamination. The one I heard about was 'demand side' contamination: all the drugs pass through peoples' metabolisms, leave their bodies and end up in the public water supply that way. The researchers were puzzled by how people who had never taken the drugs were accumulating traces of them in their bodies and they traced it back to their drinking water. Nasty.