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Beginnings, antibiotics of mother nature
The most remote use of antibiotics occurred in China more than 2500 years ago. It was then known that the application of soybean mold curd on certain infections had therapeutic benefits. Other ancient cultures used mold and certain plants to treat infections because they contained antibiotics. This is called an antibiosis. The principle of antibiosis was described when Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch observed that a bacillus in the air could inhibit the growth of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. -
Penicillin
The first antibiotic discovered was penicillin, in 1897 by Ernest Duchesne, in France, who worked with fungi of the genus Penicillium, although his work did not receive the attention of the scientific community. -
Salvarsan
Research in the field of modern antibiotic therapeutics began in Germany with the development of the short-spectrum antibiotic Salvarsan by Paul Ehrlich in 1909.4 That discovery enabled the effective treatment of syphilis, a widespread public health problem at the time. , also effective in fighting other spirochete infections, is no longer used at present. -
Staphylococcus aureus
Alexander Fleming, a British doctor, grew a bacterium (Staphylococcus aureus) on an agar dish, which was accidentally contaminated by fungi. Then he noticed that the culture around the mold was free of bacteria. Fleming was able to make a correct interpretation of what he saw: the fungus was secreting something that inhibited the growth of the bacteria. He reported the discovery in the scientific literature. Since the fungus was of the genus Penicillium, he named the product penicillin. -
Continuation work of fleming
More than 10 years later, Ernst Chain and Howard Walter Florey became interested in Fleming’s work and produced a purified form of penicillin. A former student of Fleming, Cecil George Paine, made the first clinical experiments with penicillin in neonatal ophthalmic neonates, achieving success in 1930. Paine did not publish these results, which Chain and Florey later did. The three researchers, Fleming, Chain and Florey, shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945. -
Gramicidin
In 1939, René Dubos isolated gramicidin, one of the first commercially manufactured antibiotics used for the treatment of wounds and ulcers. -
World War II
Due to the pressing need to treat infections caused by wounds during World War II, considerable resources were invested in research and purification of penicillin, and a team led by Howard Florey succeeded in producing large quantities of the pure active ingredient in 1940. -
Generalization of antibiotics
Antibiotics soon became widely used since 1943. -
Clodomiro Picado
In March 2000, doctors at the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Costa Rica published manuscripts by Clodomiro Picado explaining his experiences between 1915 and 1927 about the inhibitory action of the Penicillium fungi on the growth of infectious staphylocococci and streptococci, which is why it is recognized as one of the precursors of the antibiotic penicillin, by Fleming. The report of penicillin by Picado were published by the Society of Biology of Paris in 1927. -
One of the great advances in history
The discovery of antibiotics, as well as anaesthesia and the adoption of hygienic practices by health workers (e.g. hand washing and use of sterile instruments), revolutionized health care and became one of the great health breakthroughs of history. Antibiotics are often called “magic bullets”, a term used by Ehrlich, because they target microorganisms without harming the host.