4.+The+Invention+of+Penicillin

==Penicillin is a drug originated from mould which was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928, as he was studying influenza, when mould had accidently formed on some culture dishes used to grow the staphylococci germ. It had formed a bacteria-free area around itself, so Alexander experimented some more and named the mould “penicillin”. However Australian Howard Florey and German Ernst Chain produced penicillin in the form of a drug, and by the 1940’s it was being mass produced by American drug companies. It was the first antibiotic which treated [|microbial diseases]**__,__** and without penicillin according to Trevor Stone – head of pharmacology at the University of Glasgow and author of // Pills, Potions and Poisons: How Drugs Work // in 2004 “75% of people now alive would not be alive because their parents or grandparents would have succumbed to infections. The effects of a drug like this are absolutely mind- boggling.” This is because if you have a serious infection you would die. == ==The effects of penicillin were wide-spread and long lasting even though it was only a recent discovered. It shows that it was wide-spread as there are other types of antibiotics that have been created which do the same job as penicillin. If penicillin had not been discovered then it would be more common for people to die on a regular basis as they would not find an antibiotic to treat for an infection. Penicillin was especially effective as soon after it was discovered during World War 2 it helped prevent the chance of wounds getting infected which increased survival chances. ==

==According to Medical historian Stephen Greenberg, coordinator of public services for the History of Medicine division of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. said that "We keep on coming up with newer and hotter antibiotics, and yet we already wore out the basic ones. So you get into the question of whether the pharmacology people will be able to keep up with the change in the bugs they are fighting. That is going to be really the cutting edge of the future." This is true as each brand may be coming up with the same idea but the drug will target the bacteria instantly. == ==Penicillin has changed people’s views and thoughts, which is because people think that they can take it all the time to fix every minor thing, like small and irrelevant pain which is bad as it allows bacteria to develop a resistance against the antibiotic. Therefore if there was something really wrong with you it would be harder for you to fight the infection as your immune system would be use to the dug therefore it would have less impact on you making it harder to fight the bad bacteria. It has shaped our knowledge on past as doctors have learnt how to treat infections and why we get creating a better understanding of how our body works in relation to fighting bad bacteria. ==