One in six courses of antibiotics fails to treat infections - and sometimes it's as bad as one out of every two - suggesting the age of the 'superbug' is getting ever closer.
The antibiotic failure rate now stands at 15.4 percent, which means the drugs failed to treat the condition, or the patient needed a second course within a month, or suffered further complications or even died from the infection.
A study of antibiotic usage in the UK found that some doctors were still prescribing antibiotics inappropriately, and were doing so just to get the patient out of the surgery, a new analysis from Cardiff University has discovered.
The researchers reviewed prescriptions for 11 million doses over a 22-year period for conditions such as upper respiratory infections, tonsillitis, pneumonia and ear infections.
Over that period, the antibiotic effectiveness rate has fallen from 13.9 percent to 15.4 percent. But it was much higher for conditions such as bronchitis and pneumonia, for which the failure rate was as high as 30 percent.
One antibiotic, trimethoprim, is now failing 70 percent of the time for conditions such as pneumonia and bronchitis.
(Source: BMJ, 2014; 349: g5493)
WDDTY Sept 2014
Infections are getting harder to treat year after year and these antibiotic resistant strains are not responding to traditional treatment like they used to. Sometimes the side effects of the antibiotics are worse than the condition that it's treating. Not only do they strip the good germ from your body but will also make you susceptible to secondary infections like fungal or yeast. We see a lot of female patients with this dilemma of going in between a bacterial urinary tract infection being treated with antibiotics to only suffer yeast problems after. Same goes for individuals with upper respiratory infections. It's time to wake up and take a different approach to YOUR health. And by the looks of it already it seems that this is going to be another difficult respiratory type of year with what we've seen already coming into the office. Too many people are being treated with antibiotics for a viral respiratory infections and Colds when antibiotics have no effect on viruses. These are some of the small problems that contribute to the Superbug infections of today.
Dr. J
