Team:Peking R/HumanPractice

Recent E.coli outbreak in Europe has reminded us the fact that bacterial antibiotic resistance has been a worldwide hazard to public health. Though antibiotics have been considered as the primary solution to most infectious diseases and have saved billions of lives since their discovery, more and more bacterium become resistant against them. Scientists have to struggle to develop new kinds of antibiotics while how long these new antibiotics could keep effective remains doubtful. Besides, it is quit common to find bacteria pollution on antibiotic medium, even on multi-antibiotic medium, in microbiology lab. We must do something to improve this terrible situation. In order to investigate the extent to which laboratories understand biosafety issues regarding antibiotic usage, we have carried out a survey involving about 150 participants, for more information, please click 'investigation'.

Inappropriate use of antibiotics is a major cause of bacterial antibiotic resistance. Medical practitioners depend heavily on antibiotics and abuse them; the public can get access to antibiotics without prescriptions, and does not strictly follow recommend dose at all times. Therefore the antibiotic resistance bacteria were selected and further spreaded.

To make things worse, antibiotics are also widely used in agriculture. Though easily ignored, agriculture costs most antibiotics that are produced, and the antibiotic abuse usually evades appropriate supervision.
Researchers, being too familiar with antibiotic-resistant bacteria to treat them with caution, may also jeopardize public health even if they have undergone professional training in biosafety. Moreover, with the development of synthetic biology and standard toolkits, researchers without professional backgrounds in biology may also get access to this field. This trend inevitably increases the risk of biohazards.