However, the changing nature of bacterial pathogens and the increasing presence of strains resistant to numerous antibiotic drugs has caused an increased need for vaccine development. Antibiotics are basically defined as natural substances that inhibit the growth, or proliferation, of bacteria or kill them directly. In practice, most commercially available antibiotics have been chemically altered in the laboratory to improve their potency or to increase the range of species they affect. Since their discovery, antibiotics have been hailed as a miracle drug because of their extreme effectiveness in combating bacterial infection. However, as antibiotics have become increasingly used, various bacterial strains have also evolved to obtain methods of resisting the effects of certain antibiotics.
Bacteria can obtain resistance through various mechanisms.
The growing presence of resistant bacterial strains provides an increasingly enormous problem for the treatments of these bacterial infections. As bacteria can no longer be targeted or killed with certain antibiotics, the need for vaccines to successfully fight infections becomes increasingly apparent. Vaccines that can produce memory B cells for extracellular bacterial infections will allow an individual to fight off the pathogen before systemic infection or disease can occur. This next step is one of the only methods left to combat diseases that have acquired resistance to antibiotic drugs. Countries of the developing world face the problem of increasing antibiotic resistance in two ways.