Antimicrobials
Antibiotics, resistance, and the microscopic arms race inside us.
Foundations
How antibiotics kill, how bacteria resist, and how a drug is chosen for the bug.
Cell-Wall Inhibitors
The β-lactams and their allies — penicillins, cephalosporins, carbapenems, and vancomycin.
Protein-Synthesis Inhibitors
Drugs that jam the bacterial ribosome — aminoglycosides, tetracyclines, macrolides and more.
DNA, Folate & Others
Fluoroquinolones, sulfonamides, metronidazole and the urinary agents.
Antimycobacterials
The long war on tuberculosis and leprosy — and why they take so many drugs, for so long.
Antifungals
Fighting a cell far more like our own — polyenes, azoles, echinocandins and the rest.
Antivirals
Herpes, influenza, HIV and hepatitis — hitting a hijacker that lives inside our cells.
Antiparasitics
Malaria, protozoa and worms — the drugs for humanity's oldest infections.
Topical Agents & Prevention
Skin creams, antiseptics, vaccines, and preventing infection before it starts.
How Antibiotics Work: Targets, Spectrum & Selective Toxicity
You swallow a pill that kills billions of bacteria inside you — yet leaves your own cells completely unharmed. How can one drug tell the invader from the host so precisely? That single question, 'selective toxicity,' is the foundation of every antibiotic ever made. Answer it, and the whole bewildering list of drug classes collapses into a simple map of just six targets.
Antibiotic Resistance: How Bacteria Fight Back
Barely a decade after penicillin was unleashed, the bacteria it once wiped out were shrugging it off. Today, infections we thought conquered are killing again, and doctors are running out of drugs. But bacteria don't 'learn' to resist in the way we imagine — the truth is stranger and more dangerous, and it explains exactly why every unnecessary antibiotic makes the world a little sicker.
Choosing an Antibiotic: Cidal vs Static, Empiric Therapy & PK/PD
A patient is dying of sepsis and there's no time to wait for the lab — so how does a doctor pick the right antibiotic out of dozens, right now? And once chosen, why must one drug be given as a single big daily dose while another is dripped continuously all day? These aren't arbitrary rituals. They flow from a few elegant rules about how antibiotics actually kill.
Penicillins: The First and Still the Greatest
A mould spore drifting onto a forgotten dish gave humanity its first true miracle drug — one that kills bacteria by making them tear themselves apart, yet is so harmless to us that we give it to newborns. Nearly a century on, penicillins remain a cornerstone of medicine. But a single ring of atoms is both their genius and their weakness, and bacteria have spent decades learning to snip it.
Cephalosporins: Climbing the Generations
Picture a ladder of antibiotics where each rung you climb trades one strength for another — losing some grip on Gram-positive bugs but reaching further into stubborn Gram-negative ones, until at the very top a single drug does the impossible for a β-lactam: it kills MRSA. That ladder is the cephalosporins, and understanding its logic tells you exactly which one to reach for.
