Antibiotics & Antivirals
- Year(s) Officially Discovered: Late 1800s Through The 2000s
- Discovery Put Into Action: The 1910s To 1940s
- Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Alexander Fleming, Gertrude Elion
Every antibiotic we see in the medical community today would likely not be present if not for the very first that was accidentally created/discovered by Dr. Alexander Fleming. The story goes that the Biologist was working with some Staphylococci in an effort to learn more about it and how it could be fought. He was using the fungus, Penicillin sp, at the time. Yet not with the Staph. Rather, it was simply close to it. Fleming accidentally left one of the Staph sectors exposed and the Penicillin apparently got on it, killing the Staph. He used this knowledge to create a drug that could potentially kill possible infections in humans. He’d manage to do so, releasing Penicillin and potentially saving billions of lives worldwide.
Antibiotics do not actually get rid of infections in the human body, however. For humans, they help us with the symptoms of the infection while our body removes the infection itself. This same knowledge applies to Antivirals too. There have been experimental versions of antivirals for years, but they did not ramp up until the 1980s. The originals were for treating Herpes, HIV/AIDs, and other STDs. Today, we have some that treat the flu among other viruses. Yet they have a long way to go to be as effective as antibiotics are on infections. Yet they work the same way, effectively helping with symptoms while the body rids itself of the virus.