Newer Antibiotics

Antibiotic therapy is an art and a science. There are so many confounding variables, such as suspected pathogen, ability to establish drainage, pharmacokinetic properties of the drug,virulence of the infection etc that it is not possible to make antibiotic therapy into a mechanistic technologic science.It is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between what might be called the older antibiotics and the modern antibiotics, but for the purpose of this discussion the sulphonamides and penicillin will be classed amongst the older drugs. These of course represented a tremendous advance in bacterial chemotherapy; in fact the sulphonamides were the first series of drugs really capable of dealing with bacteria after they had invaded the organisms. Nevertheless, this older group of substances have important limitations.The development of the newer antibiotics constitutes a great advantage in that several substances are now usually available in the treatment of a condition due to a particular organismIt is worth emphasizing too that resistance to the newer antibiotics tends to develop much more slowly than to some of the older ones and this may prove a great advantage.