Lilly wrote:
They DO create resistant strains of bacteria, aka "SuperBugs". More and
more antibiotics are becoming less and less capable of fixing what ails
us when it comes to bacterial infections. Just as alarming is the fact
that there are fewer and fewer "drugs of last resort".

Crashj wrote:

Antibiotics are not aimed at virial targets, they are, well,
"anti-bacterial."
Antibiotics do not cause new strains of bacteria or virii.
So what was your question, again?

Semantics issue. Antibiotics do not in and of themselves "create"
superbugs. What does happen is when someone does not take a course of
antibiotics correctly, the antibiotics will kill the most suspectible
bacteria in the doses they do take, but potentially won't kill the less
suspectible bacteria unless the full course is taken. Thus you are left
with the less suspectible bacteria that reproduce and, more often than
not, pass that tolerance to the antibiotics down to their offspring. So
over many generations of people not completing their antibiotic courses,
you get more and more specialized colonies of bacteria that can resist the
antibiotic. It's really just a selective pressure with a negative
consequence to humans.

To put it in pond terms, think of a pond with pond snails and ramshorn
snails. Say snail killer is added and kills off all the ramshorn snails,
but not all the pond snails. Now you have a pond full of pond snails. The
snail killer did not create the pond snails, that's just all that was left
behind after the treatment.

Of course the bacterial picture is more complex than this, particularly
when you consider that some bacteria can share genetic snippets with each
other. This is of course a random process, but there's the chance the
snippet relates to the drug resistance. Thus one little colony of
penicillin resistant bacteria might share the drug resistance snippet with
other neighboring colonies, creating more penicillin resistant colonies.
It's really all a matter of numbers. The more people that complete their
antibiotics course completely or don't needlessly use antibiotics, the
less likely this whole process is to happen due to a smaller potential
bacterial population exposed to these human-caused selective pressures.