Overprescribing Antibiotics

This is now a world in which some bacteria no longer succumbs to the common drugs that we use against them.  The overuse of antibiotics may be leading to further resistance.  Robert Ashley, M.D., is an internist and assistance professor of medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles who gives us some information on the increased resistance by overprescribing antibiotics.

More powerful antibiotics are used only when an infection is resistant to all other antibiotics, and the drug companies lack the incentive to develop new antibiotics.  So the question is how we best prevent drug resistance among those patients given antibiotics.  In England a group of infectious disease specialists and microbiologists published an editorial in the British Medical Journal arguing that lengthy courses of antibiotics could actually increase resistance.

When antibiotics are continued to be given after they’ve done their job just does not make sense and isn’t actually backed up by science.  When your doctor tells you to take all your antibiotics, this advice stems from a long worry that bacteria not killed by the antibiotic could develop resistance to that antibiotic.  Not all bacteria are the same and some such as those that cause tuberculosis, gonorrhea, salmonella and malaria can become resistant very quickly to antibiotics.  It is important to kill them completely.

Long regimens of antibiotics also affect other bacteria that resides normally in our bodies that are not causing infections.  The good bacteria suffer and some of the bad bacteria can become resistant to that antibiotic and later cause infections that cannot be killed by the prior drug.

In some studies ear infections in children do present a greater benefit in taking the antibiotics for 10 days rather than five.  This is also true for strep throat.  Results have been mixed for the use of antibiotic regimens.

Azithromycin has a half-life of three days and stays in your system for many days after the finish the drug.  It is obvious that we need more studies on the duration of antibiotic regimens.  The major cause of the antibiotic-resistance problem is the over-prescribing of antibiotics.  The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that 30% of all antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary, with most of these being for upper respiratory symptoms.  Focus should lie less on the duration of the regimen and more on whether the antibiotic is actually necessary.  If antibiotics are judiciously used, we may be able to curb the rising rate of antibiotic resistance.

Dr Fredda Branyon