TCO 6) Gretchen has had repeated UTIs and her doctor has prescribed several cour

Question

TCO 6) Gretchen has had repeated UTIs and her doctor has prescribed several courses of a cephalosporin antibiotic, cephalexin, to clear up her infection. Her UTI symptoms have cleared up but now she is having another problem—diarrhea.
(a) What bacterium is the likely cause of her diarrhea? How is her diarrhea related to her antibiotic usage (15 points)?
(b) Cephalosporins are broad-spectrum antibiotics. What characterizes an antibiotic as broad spectrum rather than narrow spectrum? Why don’t doctors always treat infections with broad-spectrum antibiotics (15 points)? (Points : 30)

Explanation / Answer

(a) What bacterium is the likely cause of her diarrhea? How is her diarrhea related to her antibiotic usage??

Many different types of bacteria can cause GI and diarrhea. Here are a few that you may have heard about:

Inside the intestines are millions of tiny bacteria that help digest food. When antibiotics kill harmful bacteria that cause infection, they also kill these “good” bacteria. These bacteria cause diarrhea when they die and start growing again in the intestines.

(b) Cephalosporins are broad-spectrum antibiotics. What characterizes an antibiotic as broad spectrum rather than narrow spectrum? Why don’t doctors always treat infections with broad-spectrum antibiotics???

An antibiotic may be classified basically as "narrow-spectrum" or "broad-spectrum" depending on the range of bacterial types that it affects. Narrow-spectrum antibiotics are active against a selected group of bacterial types. Broad-spectrum antibiotics are active against a wider number of bacterial types and, thus, may be used to treat a variety of infectious diseases.

The term broad-spectrum antibiotic refers to an antibiotic that acts against a wide range of disease-causing bacteria.A broad-spectrum antibiotic acts against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, in contrast to a narrow-spectrum antibiotic, which is effective against specific families of bacteria.An best example of a commonly used broad-spectrum antibiotic is ampicillin.

Narrow spectrum antibiotics are used for the specific infection when the causative organism is known.The narrow-spectrum antibiotic will not kill as many of the normal microorganisms in the body as the broad spectrum antibiotics. So, It has less ability to cause superinfection.The narrow spectrum antibiotic will cause less resistance of the bacteria as it will deal with only specific bacteria.

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