1945 Warning of Bacterial Antibiotic Resistance

But I would like to sound one note of warning. Penicillin is to all intents and purposes non-poisonous so there is no need to worry about giving an overdose and poisoning the patient. There may be a danger, though, in underdosage. It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body. The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the...

 Penicilin Resistant Staphylococcus

Another prime example of selection is resistance to penicillin. When it was introduced in the early 1940s, penicillin was a miracle drug, especially effective at curing infections caused by the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus (“staph”). In 1941, the drug could wipe out every strain of staph in the world. Now, seventy years later, more than 95 percent of staph strains are resistant to penicillin. What happened was that mutations occurred in individual bacteria that gave them the ability to ...