ABSTRACT

Antibiotic resistance has been proven to be one of the incessant hurdles in the progress of healthcare industry. One of the major reasons that enhance the rise in the cases of antibiotic resistance is the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in various sectors such as human health, livestock feed and agricultural usages. Biofilms are a specialized lifestyle exhibited by many microorganisms including bacteria that directly escalates the incidences of antibiotic resistance. With no new novel antibiotic in the clinical pipeline and indiscriminate use of broad spectrum antibiotics, phytochemicals are considered to be an alternative novel therapeutant, which can treat resistant pathogenic diseases. With various reports on the antibacterial and antibiofilm effectiveness of phytochemicals, they are an extreme point of contention in recent medical research. The diverse nature of phytochemicals along with their scanty resistance reports makes phytochemicals a potential candidate for treating resistant diseases. Thus, immediate action along with detailed research is the need of the hour to mitigate emerging and re-emerging microbial diseases having new resistance mechanisms and to manage the rapid spread of such diseases among the human population by means of novel alternate phytochemicals.