Antibiotics concern and their use in rosacea

[Apurva Tathe]

When we have rosacea, we normally use antibiotics to treat our rosacea or atleast soothe the condition of rosacea. But do you know what we are doing when we are taking antibiotics? sometimes it is prescribed by doctor or physician or sometimes it is non-prescription because we take it by our own. But do you know the effects of antibiotics we have and what we are doing to other humans and our community?

I will start with microflora of our skin. we have a number of bacteria of different classes on our skin. I will take one example of staphylococcus family of bacteria that we find normally on our skin, bacteria do not pose a health problem when normal in number but they become pathogenic and cause infectious diseases when they are frequent in number. Generally, it has been found that chronic skin condition people have frequent more number of bacteria on their skin and when it comes to rosacea, bacteria can worsen the condition of rosacea by increasing the inflammation, we all know this.

Antibiotics are only targeted for bacteria, whether you take it orally or topically, when it blocks the bacteria from reproducing it is called bacteriostatic and when it kills the bacteria it is called bactericidal. Antibiotics work by blocking the cell wall synthesis or cell membrane synthesis or mRNA synthesis or protein synthesis or DNA synthesis in bacteria and ultimately bacteria die.

Antibiotics are good when it is prescribed by your doctor and when it is given for a period of time with a diagnostic test for a particular bacteria found on your skin but it is a very concern thing when you take it on your own without any test and prescription.

Then what happens when you take antibiotics for your roscaea or any other skin diseases whether it is prescribed or non-prescribed? sometimes you take it for a short period of time and sometimes you take it for a long steady period of time. In both the conditions you are exposing your skin bacteria to antibiotics and you are actually educating your bacteria about antibiotics. Then what do bacteria do? some bacteria are blocked and some are killed and some are very smart to get past the effects of antibiotics and survive and become resistant bacteria.

Bacteria replicate very rapidly, so the get past bacteria which became resistant actually replicate in frequent numbers and now they are in majority in bacterial pool and they get this resistance through mutating genes and proteins and enzymes which are responsible for blocking antibiotic structure. This is called antibiotic resistance.

Now microbes resist the effect of medication, in this case antibiotics to bacteria, which once could successfully treat the condition is called antimicrobial resistance or AMR, because we are actually educating the microbes over the course of time.

Now there are so many strains of bacterial species which have become resistant to different antibiotics are multi-drug resistant bacteria. I have taken one example of Staphylococcus family of bacteria which are resistant to penicillin groups and in this class methicillin-resistant staphylococcus bacteria(MRSA) known as superbug which are multi-drug resistant bacteria.

After 1980, there are no new classes of antibiotics being produced. Now antibiotics are a very serious concern to consider when it comes to taking it for chronic inflammatory skin diseases and to prevent the unnecessary use of antibiotics and in turn antimicrobial resistance.