Antimicrobial drugs

Antimicrobial drug is a drug used to treat a microbial infection.

"Antimicrobial" is a general term that refers to a group of drugs that includes antibiotics, antifungals, antiprotozoals, and antivirals. An anti-microbial is a substance that kills or inhibits the growth of microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, or protozoans. Antimicrobial drugs either kill microbes (microbiocidal) or prevent the growth of microbes (microbiostatic). Disinfectants are antimicrobial substances used on non-living objects or outside the body.

Technically, antibiotics are only those substances that are produced by one microorganism that kill, or prevent the growth, of another microorganism. Of course, in today's common usage, the term antibiotic is used to refer to almost any drug that attempts to rid your body of a bacterial infection. Antimicrobials include not just antibiotics, but synthetically formed compounds as well.

Prophylactic antibiotics The goal of antibiotic prophylaxis in Odontology is to prevent the onset of infections through the entrance way provided by the therapeutic action, therefore it is indicated provided there is a considerable risk of infection, either because of the characteristics of the operation itself or the patient’s local or general condition.

The physician’s criterion for choosing antibiotic prophylaxis or not must be based on the benefit and the cost of the risk. In the last instance, the prophylaxis decision is the choice of the physician.

To that aim, patients could be classified as:

a) healthy patients,

b) patients with local or systemic infection risk factors

c) patients with post-bacteraemia focal infection risk factors.

In healthy subjects, prophylaxis is based exclusively on the risk of the procedure.