Superbugs Informative Speech - 1243 Words

Christian Lozada Dr. Menegatos HON 101 Informative Speech Manuscript This is Rebecca Lohsen. She was a healthy 17-year-old high school student and swimmer from New Jersey. In 2006, she died from a MRSA infection, and it’s an infection that’s really hard to cure because it’s caused by a kind of bacteria called a superbug. (Infectious Diseases Society of America, September 2007, para. 1). It’s important to understand what superbugs are and how they come about because they’re a present and ongoing problem, and everyone here might just be affected by them. I’ve long been interested in the problem of superbugs, and in sharing the information, because it’s a threat to public health that I think not many people know about. So, in the next few†¦show more content†¦For example, you may have heard of the woman in Reno this January who died to a â€Å"nightmare superbug† because the infection could not be cured by every available antibiotic in the United States (Nevada Public Radio, 17 January 2017, para. 3). On the Infectious Diseases Society of America website was the story of how a 19-year-old college student, Meredith Littlejohn, died to a superbug after spending time in an intensive care unit. (Infectious Diseases Society of America, n.d., para. 1-3). These are only two of thousands who die every year. And so clearly our misuse and overuse of antibiotics have created very serious, negative outcomes. Contributing to these negative outcomes, it’s not just the doctors unnecessarily giving us antibiotics, as I mentioned before, but it’s also the antibiotics in the food we eat. To reduce costs in farms, animals are held in unhealthy conditions, so in order to keep them healthy, farmers give them antibiotics. In 2010, a testimony of Dr. Stuart Levy, a professor of biology and medicine, explained how him and his team concluded that chickens almost immediately showed resistant bacteria after giving them antibiotics. They also concluded that the resistant bacteria spread easily to the to the workers, to the other animals, and even to the flies. Keep in mind pretty much all the other animals are fed antibiotics too, not just chickens (Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, 14 July 2010, para. 5-6). It’s widelyShow MoreRelatedInformative Speech On Superbugs1372 Words   |  6 Pages Christian Lozada Dr. Menegatos HON 105 29 September 2017 Informative Speech Manuscript Does anyone here ever worry about the food that you eat? Where it came from? What it’s made with? If there are any harmful chemicals? Those are of course legitimate concerns because that would be pretty scary to eat food that may just stab you in the back. Have you ever worried about an incurable infection being in your food, though? It’s not a common thought, but actually the feeding of antibiotics to food-producing