Clinical Significance of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

After a period of 14 years, antibiotics still pose problems to the clinician, and many of those problems are the result of antibiotic-resistant micro-organisms. Of course, some of the bacteria and most of the viruses and fungi have never been affected by antibiotics. Our attack on infections by those organisms consists in the development of effective antibiotics or other therapeutic agents or by measures designed to improve the host's defenses. In this paper we are concerned with some strains of bacteria that are inhibited by a certain antibiotic while other strains are not. That this does not include all of the bacteria that commonly cause infections in humans is shown in the table. Infections caused by the organisms in group 1 usually respond promptly to sufficient amounts of the proper antibiotics, and, although resistant forms have been produced with difficulty in vitro, these resistant forms have not been found in