Do you know over 150M people contract Urinary Tract Infection every year?
Urinary tract infections, or UTIs, are infections in any part of the urinary tract. They are a common health problem that affects millions of people each year. Women are especially prone to UTIs.
Urinary tract infections are one of the most common infectious diseases in the United States. They affect something like 15 million women a year with 1.5 million recurrences." says Scott Hultgren, a microbiologist at Washington University, St. Louis who helped oversee the research.
Globally, there are more than 400 million UTIs a year and that number keeps rising.
Men do get UTIs, but women get them more often, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, because their urethras are shorter and closer to the rectum.
That makes it easier for bacteria, usually E. coli, to enter the urethra during sex and colonize the urinary tract. This is why medical professionals recommend urinating after sex to flush out those bacteria.
Antibiotics are medicines used to kill bacteria over time, certain groups of these germs has adapt to these medicines. They have change in such a way that antibiotics can′t kill them. The term for this is antibiotic resistance.
Bacteria are very small organisms. They can enter your body. Some of them are harmless and may be helpful. But some of these germs can be harmful. When these multiply inside your body, they can cause serious infection.
Before antibiotics, people often got very sick from bacterial infections. With these medicines, it is now easy to treat many of these infections.
Standard antibiotics for treating a disease may no longer work in these cases. Other medicines may also not help. As a result, resistance to antibiotics is becoming more common.
Antibiotic resistance can happen when bacteria are treated with an antibiotic. The medicine kills most of these germs. But a small group may survive. This might happen in a number of ways.
The germs may:
- Develop an ability to stop the medicine’s effect
- Develop an ability to pump the medicine out of the cell
- Change (mutate) so that the medicine no longer works
When bacteria become resistant, the original antibiotic can no longer kill them. These germs can grow and spread. They can cause infections that are hard to treat. Sometimes they can even spread the resistance to other bacteria that they meet.
When you use an antibiotic, there is a risk that some of the bacteria will turn resistant. Using these medicines when they aren't needed is a major reason why that is becoming more common
Antibiotic resistance is often linked to a specific germ. For example, Staphylococcus aureus (or “staph”) is a type of bacteria that can cause illness.
Methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) is a specific strain of staph bacteria. MRSA no longer responds to the antibiotic methicillin (and closely related medicines). As a result, it can cause many infections that are hard to treat.
Symptoms In adults
- a frequent need to urinate
- pain, discomfort, or burning sensation when urinating
- a sudden urge to urinate
- cloudy, strong-smelling urine that may contain blood
- the sensation that the bladder is not fully empty
- feeling unwell, tired, and achy
In males
Males and females share the same symptoms. However, 2021 researchTrusted Source suggests that males had a higher chance of experiencing symptoms that affect the lower urinary tract
Who is at risk for antibiotic resistance?
The more people use antibiotics, the more likely that resistance will happen. Sometimes people use antibiotics when they don’t really need them.
For example, antibiotics don’t work against viruses. Like bacteria, viruses are tiny organisms that can invade your body and cause infection. A cold or the flu is a type of virus.
Taking an antibiotic in these cases does not treat the disease. It can actually raise the risk for antibiotic resistance.