Blog about health and antibiotics medicine
Kids get sick. They get sick a lot. In fact, during the first three years of life, the average child gets six to eight viral upper respiratory track infections or colds per year. This is nature’s way of building up the immune system. As a pediatrician, I see dozens of children every day due to illness. One myth that I commonly come across is that antibiotics cure all illnesses.
Doctors warn patients not to jump so quickly to ask for an antibiotic. With a bacterial infection, a portion of the bacteria might be resistant to the antibiotic. Then, that portion can multiply and mutate, and perhaps be tough to kill off.
Doctors say that’s in part because any time we use an antibiotic, it puts pressure on a bacteria to develop resistance. And, with the continued use of antibiotics in society, whether it’s in medicine form, or in the foods that we eat such as livestock where antibiotics are often used in the animals, there is more and more pressure to develop that resistance.
A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are reporting disturbing evidence that soil microbes have become progressively more resistant to antibiotics over the last 60 years. Surprisingly, this trend continues despite apparent more stringent rules on use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture, and improved sewage treatment technology that broadly improves water quality in surrounding environments. Their report appears in ACS’ bi-weekly journal Environmental Science and Technology.
Most patients who have a history of penicillin allergy can safely take antibiotics called cephalosporins, U.S. researchers say.
Cephalosporins – which are related to penicillin in their structure, uses and effects – are the most frequently prescribed class of antibiotics.
If doctors used an existing simple lab test on patients with coughs or flu-like symptoms they would be better able to decide which of them might benefit from antibiotics, scientists say.
They said prescriptions of expensive antibiotics for respiratory tract infections could be reduced by more than 40% if tests became more commonplace.
The German researchers found that testing for a marker of bacterial infection known as procalcitonin (PCT) helped identify patients whose respiratory tract infections would respond to antibiotics, and stopped others being offered unnecessary drugs.