Antibiotics Expert

The first symposium of the Annual Conference on Microbial Resistance focused on the economic and public policy aspects of antibiotic resistance and antibiotic development.

Moderator Susan Foster, PhD, of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (Boston, MA) presented first, then facilitated a Q&A session with other presenters Ramanan Laxminarayan, PhD, of Resources for the Future (Washington, DC) and Kevin Outterson, JD, LLM, of Boston University School of Law (Boston, MA).

Foster’s presentation focused on the Economic Consequences of Antibiotic Resistance. She touched on the direct and indirect costs of drug resistance, including poorer patient health, burden to families, the need to find replacement drugs when current ones fail, and other topics.

Overuse of antibiotics could raise intestinal disorders as they kill useful bacteria from the body, says a study that found such infection in 16 states of the US.

The infection – C. difficile – often strikes older hospital patients treated with antibiotics, reported news portal NorthJersey.com.

C. difficile causes severe diarrhea and other potentially life-threatening complications. But scientists say it has also begun spreading among people of all ages even who have not been hospitalised or used antibiotics.

A pattern of escalating antimicrobial resistance in the United States and other countries highlights the need to improve education about judicious antibiotic use, promote better infection control, improve systems used to determine susceptible organisms and create antibiotic regimens that will cover the broadest range of organisms, according to a speaker at the 2010 Annual Conference on Antimicrobial Resistance in Bethesda, Md.

“Combination chemotherapy will become the rule of practice as we wait for the development of new compounds and vaccines,” Ronald N. Jones, MD, of JMI Laboratories in North Liberty, Iowa, told a group of physicians at the meeting. “Maybe the future of infectious disease management is not new classes of drugs, but new classes of chemicals that attack the resistance mechanisms that are already in place.”

Ayear and a half ago, researchers found that a deadly form of staph infection was prevalent on Canadian pig farms. This year, the superbug was found in both swine and workers at U.S. farms.

The rise of bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which kills more people in this country each year than AIDS, is believed to be a consequence of the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals. Low doses of the medications have become ubiquitous in the livestock industry, mixed into feed to enhance growth and prevent the diseases that sweep through crowded pens.

A bill circulating in Washington would ban the use of antibiotics for livestock unless the animals are ill.

Proponents of the ban say over-medicating healthy animals could create super-germs resistant to medicine. Farmers and people who work with livestock say the ban could hurt their business and that pre-medicating animals with antibiotics doesn’t pose a risk to humans.

Some say, while antibiotics can be a huge help, they can also be overused.

“It’s just an example of things being done in excess that I think really doesn’t need to be done,” says Karen Kershaw of Kershaw Stables in Milton.