Probiotics

The availability of effective and cheap antibiotics revolutionized the treatment of infectious diseases and reduced the death rate drastically. However, the development of resistance to a range of antibiotics by some important pathogens has raised the possibility of return to the pre-antibiotic ¿dark-ages¿. These developments have encouraged researchers in various fields of healthcare to develop alternative antimicrobial approaches. "Probiotics" is a broad term used for a very large number of microorganisms which includes bacterial cell preparations of single or multiple bacteria which when ingested confer health benefits. The basic rationale behind the probiotics was that the human body lives in a heavily contaminated environment associated with millions of bacteria and probiotics can be utilised by replacing pathogenic microorganisms with healthy ones. With increasing understanding that beneficial microbes are required for health, probiotics may become a common therapeutic tool used by health-care practitioners in the in the not-too-distant future.