Current Level of Public Awareness of Antibiotic Resistance in Youth, Specifically Teenagers in High School

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance is a health crisis that is slowly growing throughout the world. The spread of antibiotic-resistant genes in bacteria is rendering antibiotics useless, and severe infections are running rampant. The only way to change this is for the public to take action, but how much do they know? Previous research has been conducted about the public’s knowledge of antibiotic resistance, but younger age groups are generally left out of that data. This leads to the question what is the current level of public awareness of antibiotic resistance in youth, specifically teens in high school. I hypothesized that a large number of students won’t know what antibiotic resistance is at all, and those who do know don’t fully understand what it means. To test this hypothesis, an online survey was distributed to students from a rural southeastern Michigan high school via email and homeroom classes. From the survey, results showed that students don’t understand what causes antibiotic resistance, what becomes resistant to antibiotics, and what antibiotics treat. With data from the survey, I concluded that High school students have a low to moderate level of understanding of antibiotic resistance and related topics.