Study: Fewer Antibiotics Prescribed

NEW ORLEANS (AP) â€” Doctors and parents apparently are paying attention to warnings that unnecessary use of antibiotics can be harmful by creating drug-resistant bacteria. <br><br>Doctors wrote fewer

Monday, September 11th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NEW ORLEANS (AP) â€” Doctors and parents apparently are paying attention to warnings that unnecessary use of antibiotics can be harmful by creating drug-resistant bacteria.

Doctors wrote fewer antibiotic prescriptions for children at the end of the 1990s than at the start of the decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

``Our survey suggests that physicians are getting the message that overuse of antibiotics can be harmful,'' said Linda F. McCaig, a survey statistician who will present the report to the Infectious Diseases Society of America this weekend.

In 1995, the CDC and other medical groups began a campaign to tell doctors and parents that when antibiotics are overused, they kill harmless bacteria while the resistant bacteria thrive and multiply.

``Part of the focus of the campaign was to educate parents on what kind of illnesses might be viral and don't need antibiotics. So maybe more are staying home because they know it's a virus. Or maybe they don't come in because they know the child wouldn't get an antibiotic,'' McCaig said.

An annual survey of about 2,500 doctors shows that the antibiotic prescription rate in the United States dropped 34 percent from 1989-90 to 1997-98 for children under the age of 15.

The drop was 12 percent when the CDC researchers compared the rates only for children brought to a doctor's office because of an earache, bronchitis, sore throat, sinus infection or upper respiratory infection.

``This is very exciting,'' said Dr. Stuart Levy, president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics and director of Tufts University's Center for Adaptation Genetics and Drug Resistance. ``The question will be, `Can it be continued?'''

The CDC has estimated that half of all antibiotics prescribed during visits to doctors' offices are for colds or other viruses, which cannot be treated by antibiotics.

That overuse is considered a major reason that more and more germs have become resistant to antibiotics over the past decade or two.

Several antibiotics are now useless against germs they used to kill. One-quarter of all germs that cause sinus, ear and blood infections, pneumonia and some kinds of meningitis shrug off two or more antibiotics.

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On the Net:

http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/

Association for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics: http://www.healthsci.tufts.edu/apua/home.html