• Question: does antibiotics effect you body later on in life?

    Asked by 447drud32 to Anne, Florence, Mark, Neil, Sinead on 10 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Sinead Balgobin

      Sinead Balgobin answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      They shouldn’t, because you take them to kill off bacteria that are making you sick. However, we do have friendly bacteria that live inside us that make us healthy, and we don’t want to kill them too- so we shouldn’t take too many antibiotics.

      The biggest danger of using too many antibiotics is that if all the bacteria are not killed, then they can evolve to be resistant to the antibiotics- they will be able to survive treatment, and the antibiotics won’t effect them any more. This would be really bad, because all the simple bacterial infections that we have wouldn’t be able to be cured and people would die. 100 years ago, before we had antibiotics, lots and lots of people died because of simple infections that we can treat easily today- but if the bacteria become resistant to our treatments it would be really dangerous.

      This is why you should always finish your prescription of antibiotics!

    • Photo: Florence McCarthy

      Florence McCarthy answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      A course of antibiotics is relatively short lived in your body so there should be no adverse effect as long as you do exactly as prescribed by the doctor. However a course of antibiotics taken by an elderly person can have some effects as their functions are not as good as when they were young – commonly older people suffer from some liver damage or kidney damage and so the antibiotics may have a more pronounced effect. For this reason they must be carefully checked by their doctor.

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