Each year, antibiotic-resistant bacteria threaten more and more people. As much of a problem as it is, many people are not educated about the term drug resistance. Because this is such a growing concern, it becomes confusing why drug resistance is occurring and what can be done to prevent it. Since drug resistance is a health problem, determining what it is, how these bacteria can acquire antimicrobial agents, and possible solutions to resistance are the types of actions that need to be taken to better understand how potent these drug-resistant bacteria really are. drugs. Drug resistance is the ability of a microbe, such as bacteria, to continue growing even in the presence of an antimicrobial, which should have stopped growth or killed the microbe. In this particular case, the antimicrobial is rendered useless when attempting to treat or cure a specific infection. As a result, the drug becomes ineffective due to the resistance that the microbe has developed towards it. The reason this happens is because of a gene possessed by some microbes, which allows them to become resistant to antimicrobials. Bacteria can develop this resistance through mutations as well as when a bacterium obtains a new DNA helicase. When there is a mutated bacterium, the antimicrobial, in many cases, has difficulty recognizing the genetic material of the bacteria. That said, if the antimicrobial doesn't have the ability to locate the binding site on bacterial DNA, the drug won't have a chance to work. Fluoroquinolones are a perfect example of how bacteria can develop resistance through resistance. Fluoroquinolones cannot bind to the enzymes DNA gyrase and topoisomerase if these enzymes are mutated... middle of paper ... in the case of the antibiotic known as vancomycin. To treat the ferocious bacterium, the drug vancomycin was introduced with the hope of providing a therapy for the infection. However, a gene resistant to this drug eventually emerged and began to spread in hospitals. “These strains, known as vancomycin-resistant S. aureus (VRSA), are the progeny of MRSA that had acquired a set of five genes that travel together as a “cassette” and confer vancomycin” (Walsh & Fishbach, 2009). Unfortunately, the enzyme located in the resistant gene of the bacterium allows the target to be changed, which does not allow vancomycin to bind. Obviously MRSA and VRSA pose a huge dilemma as both bacteria can spread quite easily and the resistant gene is so powerful that even drugs that would be considered "last resort" develop problems when it comes to trying to treat them..