ABSTRACT
Antimicrobial agents represent the greatest advance in modern curative medicine. These drugs are reckoned to have extended the life span of the average US citizen by 10 years, whereas curing all cancer would prolong life by 3 years (McDermott, 1982). Recent evidence, however, points to an inexorable increase in the prevalence of microbial drug resistance apparently paralleling the expansion of the antimicrobial usage in various fields. Therapeutic difficulties are now posed by strains of certain bacteria such as enterococci and tuberculosis bacteria, which have the ability to acquire resistance to the most useful and possibly to all agents currently in use. Thus, antimicrobial resistance particularly among bacteria has become an increasingly important problem, which has serious implications for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that the benefits in real-dollar terms of resulting from the use of developed and marketed antibiotics far outweighs costs of adverse effects, including resistance (Liss and Batchelor, 1987).
