Re: what would happen if you had an bacterial disease before penicillin

Hi Sarah,
Thanks for your question. It's a very interesting one, with lots of things to think about. I'd like to tell you a little bit about penicillin, how it works, what we did without it and what we might do in the future when it stops working!

You probably know that it was Alexander Fleming who discovered that some fungi produce a substance that can kill bacteria. However, Fleming didn't follow through with his work or isolate the substance from the bacteria. This was done by two scientists in Oxford during World War II, Ernst Chain and Howard Florey (a great Australian scientist from Adelaide). They managed to isolate small amounts of penicillin and used it to treat a policeman who had a bacterial infection after being burned. The treatment worked, but unfortunately they ran out of penicillin and the patient died. However, later they managed to produce penicillin in large amounts and it became the widely-used antiobiotic that we know today.

Penicillin works because it is similar to a component found in the walls that surround some bacterial cells. If you want to know some more technical details, there's lots of information at this website.

OK, now to your main question-what did people do before there was penicillin? The simple answer is that a lot more people became seriously ill or died when they were infected by bacteria. Most of the time, they would have to hope that the natural defence of their immune system would be able to fight the infection. Of course, this is true for lots of other medical problems-in the past, far more people used to die from cancer, heart disease and infection by viruses (like plague-and remember, antibiotics like penicillin don't work against viruses). But it would be wrong to think that there was no medical treatment before penicillin. There is a lot of evidence that ancient civilisations, especially the Egyptians and the Chinese, used extracts from plants because they knew that these had antibiotic properties. And did you know that even ants use antibiotics!

The last thing to tell you about is the problem of antibiotic resistance. We've been using antiobiotics like penicillin for a long time now, not always wisely, and some bacteria have developed resistance to practically all of our major antibiotics. This is already causing problems such as the reappearance of TB and is going to be a big health problem in the future. You can read about this problem and maybe try to think about some ways to solve it.

Finally, as someone who works with bacteria, I have to tell you that not all bacteria are bad. There are bacteria that live in our guts, helping with digestion, and bacteria are largely responsible for recycling nutrients that plants and animals need around the whole earth. Only a very few are hazardous to human health.

I hope this has been interesting for you and helped to answer your question,
Neil Saunders