Penicillin Can Reduce the Risk of Strokes

Penicillin is a young but rather classic antibiotic. We say it is young because it is the first antibiotics in the world, which was discovered only eighty years ago. It is classic because it is versatile in clinics. It is particularly helpful to restrain the proliferation and kill bacteria. Therefore, it is widely used to cure infections in clinics. According to past statistics, it saved more than 10 million people from late 1940s to early 1950s. Today, it has found more family members and made great contribution to the health care of human beings. This antibiotic has a short history. One day in 1928, British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming accidentally found an interesting phenomenon in his lab. An abandoned bacterial culture medium was infected by penicillium. But it was clean around the penicillium. He supposed that penicillium might be certain germicide. Then he separated the penicillium from other bacteria and found that a substance it produced can kill other bacteria. Later, he named the substance penicillin. Alexander Fleming’s experiment did not solve the mass production problem. Penicillin did not go out of labs until eleven years later. In the year of 1940, Howard Florey and Ernst B. Chain successfully discovered the techniques and made penicillin come into hospital. The study of penicillin never stops. Recently, Canadian experts have found that penicillin is able to reduce the risk of strokes by about 50%. They published an article on a medical magazine called Stroke. The article has indicated that when people are infected by bacteria, various inflammations would appear. In the long run, arteriosclerosis causes storage of fat in blood and may lead to strokes and heart diseases at any time. Canadian experts studied the records of high blood pressure patients. They surveyed these patients to find that the risk of strokes would be much lower than usual if penicillin was used when they didn’t feel well. More specifically, the risk of strokes for patients who took it at that time was reduced by 50%, while the risk for those who had taken it some days ago decreased by 27%. Even the risk for people who used to take this medicine went down by 14%. Studies have also suggested that the effect of penicillin on preventing strokes is far better than other kinds of antibiotics. Experts explain that it may be closely related to its wider range of application. But there are still problems. Experts argue that the results are so primary that they need further proves. Stoke has a variety of causes. We are not sure that if people get strokes because of smoking, drinking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, lack of exercises or genes. But at present, we are sure that we have a new way to prevent stoke.