to be really annoyed about antibiotics?

[WaterfallsOver]

Or rather their misuse. I have parent friends who run to the GP every time little Billy has a cough, demanding antibiotics, so many people see them as a panacea. I'm not medically trained but I know they don't work on viruses and many illnesses need to run their course with no medical intervention.

The news is telling us antibiotics won't work in a few years due to over/misuse. I feel really angry that selfishness and stupidity mean in a few years people may die from infections resistant to antibiotics :( if they were only used for serious illness perhaps we'd have a chance. There was a guy who died from resistant infection on the news :(

If antibiotics had been used cautiously they wouldn't need new ones to be discovered.

I went to a brilliant talk by John Maynard Smith 20 odd years ago where he was ranting (really a good description) about antibiotic resistance and how avoidable it was, and how evolutionary biologist had warned clinicians/healthcare systems etc at the time of introduction how resistance would evolve if they were not treated with respect.

I agree with Gracelo - and I see little point in developing more if they're just going to be made useless in a few years by our stupidity.

Big worry for us as LO is on long term antibiotics due to life limiting medical condition.

It is possible we will develop more antibiotics but (a) this is by no means certain (b) funding lags (c) if antibiotic resistance continues, there will be casualties in the meantime.

I agree people are under pressure to go to work regardless, which is wrong (especially if they are spreading their germs around) and people do have a legitimate expectation to get treated. However, antibiotics will do nothing against a viral infection.

Some people seem to treat antibiotic prescription as a "badge" that they are really ill (believe me, you can be very ill with a virus).

The only sure fire way is to test not only if something is viral or bacterial, but they type of bacteria as not all antibiotics will tackle all. That is timely, expensive and hit and miss (or invasive) and in most (but not all) cases the body will heal itself (rest etc obviously help).

I think the current plea reflects a very real concern. OK I am biased here as antiresistance really could be a case of life and death one day for my LO. Nobody is saying you shouldn't use antibiotics, just please let's apprecaite how important they are and use them wisely. (And don't even start me on the subject of their use in cleaning products and agriculture....)

I keep saying it but is excellent and explains why relying on creating new drugs is not a solution.

I've yet to meet a doctor that hands out antibiotics willy nilly.

Really? I was given a prescription for some last week because I have a dysbiosis (not an infection). Antibiotics seems a bonkers way to treat that to me. Rather than argue about it I took the prescription and haven't used it.

It's terrible. Antibiotic resistance has been foreseen for years. You don't need a massive amount of education to understand it (A level Biology will do). Yet, it's happening, just as it was being predicted it would 15 years ago.

It always amazes me that people get annoyed with others for asking for anti biopics - surely it's the GP's who should know this? But as I said earlier,I have never met a GP who hands them out like Smarties and I have moved around a lot.

Hm - well the Andrew Read talk makes the point that doctors say that they pay lip service to antibiotic resistance and then go ahead and treat their patients with them anyway. iirc (it's a while since I've watched it) he is saying there needs to be stronger gatekeeping so they are used more as a last resort - to preserve their usefulness (as for various reasons he has rejected relying on discovering new treatments as an approach to take).

I certainly didn't need the antibiotics I was prescribed last week and so I haven't used them, but I have no idea really why they were prescribed in the first place. Although actually thinking about it the GP didn't prescribe them, the test results came back and triggered an automatic prescription with no discussion, presumably signed by one of the GP's but without discussion. We only had a discussion at all because I was having a routine carer's check. Anyway it was very odd, and imo that sort of system needs to go.

(Oh and the talk isn't particularly critical of doctors - the audience of doctors laughs when he says the bit about paying lip service to resistance)

My DSs have only had antibiotics once or twice. I had a particularly annoying Au Pair from France who told me I ought to take DS2 to the Dr because he was spluttering with a cold. I said there was no point - it was a cold and he would be fine. She told me proudly that she had her own supply of antibiotics in her bedroom and she used them reequently. I told her that it was a bad idea (in some detail).

Another AP with "flu" (ie a bad cold) demanded the Dr saw her and gave her something...she was advised to go home and drink tea. I tried to get her to eat some fruit, and she refused. She didn't last long.

Sorry - work..

saintlyjimjams, worldwide many farmers still use ABs on cattle, regardless of the Eu ban. Some UK animals will be fed on feed containing them.

I know, I linked to something saying that later :(

I worry about this too. I've taken so many abs over my lifetime that I have no resistance left to most of them. Amoxicillin et al does sod all now. I'm on long term azithromycin and have my own stock of cipro which I go on when I start to get an infection. I'm 'lucky' in that my GP/consultant trusts me to take them sensibly and recognise my symptoms, because if I had to wait for a sample to grow everytime I'd be far, far more poorly and probably worse. They are literally a lifesaver to me, but in the last few years I've had to have more and more inpatient IV treatment because the oral abs are not working. It is scary, and yes it does annoy me when they are used incorrectly or willy-nilly.

I worked in a public analyst's lab one holiday when I was at university, and they had an agricultural analyst there, too.

Without exception, all the animal feedstuffs that came in for analysis contained antibiotics.

Our dd had loads of ear infections, routinely being given antibiotics. Just before she was 2, we were on holiday in France when I had sinusitis. The pharmacy gave me n-acetyl cysteine. It's a mucolytic and thins the mucous so that it can drain from sinuses, ears etc. The next time we were on holiday in France I bought some - 200mg sachets for 2 and over. The pharmacist explained that if dd'd been less than 2 there was a 100mg version. For the next 6 years, whenever she had a cold, we gave her nac. She probably only had antibiotics once in all that time.

It is available on prescription in the UK. It was around years ago, but disappeared and then came back in the same statutory instrument that told gp's they didn't have to do out of hours care, so didn't really get noticed.

Regarding onions and garlic, in France when someone was ill with a cold/infection they used to put a cut onion in the room in the belief that the onion would absorb the infection. Also, during the 1960s outbreak of foot and mouth, there was a farm that covered all the windowsills around the cow sheds etc with onions, and they were the only farm in the area not to be affected. They did this because in the previous outbreak they weren't affected and found that in a barn used to store onions, all the onions had rotted. Perhaps onions are more useful than thought.

Don't you think it may have might be to do with the use of antibiotics in the food chain (which we eat daily over years and years) rather than occasional use of prescribed ones??

Onions rot. Placing a cut onion in a room with you will not cure an infection.

No doubt some GPs prescribe antibiotics when they shouldn't and others don't prescribe antibiotics whilst they should.

I think the biggest problem is antibiotics misuse/abuse/overuse in farming. Dairy farmers, chicken farmers etc. Every time you buy eggs of hens vaccinated against salmonella, they really mean that they are from hens who get daily antibiotics through their drinking system .....

Another problem is the abuse of antibiotics in a number of countries where you can just buy them over the counter (this used to be the case in Spain for example, not sure if they still allow it).

A Daddy friend at playgroup told me the cut- onion- as- cure-for- cold theory, in all seriousness, just the other day.

(diplomatic silence emoticon)

I would like to know more about cleaning products. I use anti-bacterial spray- does it really contain antibiotics? If it does, I shall cease forthwith- but why would it need to? There are plenty of substances that kill bacteria that you can put in cleaning spray that aren't antibiotic, aren't there?

Actually, this leads me to wondering what the actual difference between an antibiotic and something that kills bacteria is. I mean, alcohol kills bacteria, so does salt, but they're not antibiotics.

Is an antibiotic something that can enter the bloodstream?

At my doctors, not in the UK, if they suspect you need antibiotics you get properly tested first to confirm it. They have a lab on site and usually takes about 15 minutes for the results to come through.

I just googled 'percentage of antiobiotics used in agriculture'. I'm not sure what the percentage is here, but in the US it is in excess of 80% of all antiobiotics used in that country.

The agricultural lobby seem to have done a good job in deflecting criticism of its practices onto 'evil oversubscribing GPs', when it is clear that said GPs constitute only a minority of the problem. (I do agree, BTW, that antibiotics should, of course, also be used in humans sparingly!)

The US does use antibiotics in farming a lot more than here (and has done for years). We're certainly not good guys, but we don't use them as much as the US. If you scroll down there are EU figures in this article

Someone can correct me if i'm wrong here but technically:
an antibiotic is any substance that kills micro-organisms
an antibacterial kills bacteria
an antiviral kills viruses
an anti fungal kills fungi

In everyday terms 'antibiotic' tends to be used to refer to anti-bacterial medication e.g. penicillin and the term anti-bacterial tends to be used for soaps and cleaning stuff.

A prominent researcher in the field gave an excellent keynote speech on antibiotics at the Society for General Microbiology conference last year. So many were discovered (and note I say "discovered", not "developed", because they are all compounds found in nature and all we do is refine them or figure out synthetic versions) so quickly, they seemed an amazing miracle.

Like oil and gas and stuff.

And then we went crazy over-using them. Like oil and gas and stuff.

But now they've run out, there really aren't any new ones. Bacteria multiply by the billions daily. It's evolution on fast-forward so they can adapt resistance way faster than we'll ever be able to find new antibiotics.

It's not news, no, so I don't know why it's suddenly hit the press again. But it's a huge concern. Terrifying, in fact. The implications of not being able to treat any bacterial infection are enormous. Medical conditions we take for granted as being minor are going to start becoming fatal.

And the use of antibiotics in agriculture is FAR more of an issue then their use in medicine, despite those who deny it.

Yes the antibacterial stuff in cleaners is different to antibiotics. They are usually peroxides or alcohols, that sort of thing rather than penicillins or cephalosporins or whatever other class of antibiotics.

50% of antibiotic use in the UK is agricultural. It is likely that a significant proportion of antibiotic resistant bacteria in humans are acquired via the food chain.
The UK has relatively low antibiotic use compared to many other countries (am on phone so can't do links, but this is publicly available data); lowest human consumption in Europe (per capita) is Holland. Generally speaking in Europe, there is a gradient from northwest to southeast, with southeast being highest (Greece has highest levels in EU). A similar gradient is seen for detection of penicillin resistance in pneumococci (common bacterial cause of pneumonia), highest resistance in those countries with highest antibiotic consumption (which are the same countries which allow over the counter antibiotic purchase).
There are problems with discovery/ development, which need to be tackled at a supranational level.
This seems to have turned into a very long post. If interested, the TED talk, the Antibiotic Action and the 10x20 initiative website are good places to go!