What can we do to decrease the intake of antibiotics?

Question: What can we do to decrease the intake of antibiotics?
- Keywords:
- Click on a keyword to find out more on the RSC site:
  
  antibiotic
Asked by Sophie? to Daniela ?, ☣ Danna, Jonny, Juan, Lindsay on 13 Jun 2016.
- Danna Gifford answered on 13 Jun 2016:
  
  Hi Sophie,
  What a good question. The #1 thing we can do is to only use antibiotics when absolutely necessary. That means if someone has a cough, for example, they might just have a cold, and should not take antibiotics.
  
  It’s important to listen to your doctor when you are ill. Sometimes, it’s difficult even for doctors to know what sort of illness a patient has—is it a bad cold, a flu, or a bacterial chest infection?
  
  A doctor can try to test if it’s a bacterium, but this takes a lot of time and sometimes gives the wrong answer. Sometimes, the doctor decides the safest thing to do for the patient in this case is to prescribe antibiotics, because a bacterial chest infection can be very dangerous.
  
  If doctors were able to tell whether an infection was a virus or a bacterium, they would know better when to give antibiotics. An important area of research right now is on diagnosing infections quickly, using new methods like DNA sequencing. Doctors can then prescribe fewer antibiotics, because they can be confident when it is and isn’t necessary.
  
  Another goal for reducing the use of antibiotics is in farming. In some places, small amounts of antibiotics are given to animals to make them grow faster.
  
  This low-dose amount is perfect for bacteria to evolve resistance. Some of the antibiotic resistance we see comes from use in farming, which then spreads into people.
  
  Stopping the use of antibiotics to make animals grow faster could reduce the amount of resistance. Although farmers would then make less money, it might be a small price to pay for saving our antibiotics.
- Juan Ortiz answered on 13 Jun 2016:
  
  I think Danna has covered all I could say. So I have nothing to add
- Jonathan Hunter answered on 13 Jun 2016:
  
  Danna’s pretty much covered everything.
  However, there could also be room for the prescription of placebos.
  There is some evidence that, if you are given a placebo (a tablet/injection/etc with no active pharmaceutical compound), but believe you are getting the real thing, that you will get better anyway.
  It’s a bit of controversial topic, but I personal think it could have an interesting role to play.
- Daniela Lobo answered on 15 Jun 2016:
  
  Hi Sophie,
  To the previous (and complete) answers given by Danna and Jonny, I would just add 2 things:
  You should ALWAYS do the full course of the antibiotic; this means, if the doctor prescription says you have to take the antibiotic for 10days, you can’t stop taking it until you finish it; this was a very common situation I observed when I was working at the pharmacy, in which people would stop taking the antibiotic because they started feeling better after 3/4 days. You should always take the antibiotic until the end, unless your doctor tells you otherwise. If you don’t, you are allowing the strongest of bacteria to remain in your body and later, multiply; you may get sick again and this time the bacteria might have changed to be resistant to the antibiotic you were taking previously, and that same antibiotic might not work anymore.
  Another thing, a bit more controversial, is the usage of low-dose of antibiotic in some common drugs, like things for when you have a aching throat (we call this sub-therapeutic dose, because the amount of antibiotic present in that drug is not enough to kill all the bacteria, which could again allow for bacteria to become resistant).

Question: What can we do to decrease the intake of antibiotics?

Comments