Appropriate Use of Antibiotics is Essential to Slow the Emergence of Resistance and Extend the Useful Lifetime of Effective Antibiotics

When pathogens become resistant to antibiotics, they find ways to stop other antibiotics from working that they used to be sensitive to. Pathogens of different types can improve defenses or tactics in more than one way, such as through natural or learned means. When a virus can protect itself from any drugs, this is called innate resistance. This may have happened because the capsules don't let pathogens through easily. There may be other reasons, such as differences in the chemical makeup of the drug and the viruses' membrane structures. Acquired resistance is the development of antibiotic resistance that can happen for a number of different reasons. For example, the pathogen may have been sensitive to the pills at first, but through the process they build up resistance mechanisms. Transformation, transduction, conjugation, and transfer of plasmids are the most common ways for bacteria or pathogens to make the resistance stronger.