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By: Summer Tierney
As the so-called “season” of colds and flus makes this year’s debut, yet another reason emerges to avoid antibiotics – or at least be more cautious and discriminating about when and how to use them. The United Kingdom now acknowledges that the excessive prescription and subsequent overuse of antibiotics can have deadly consequences if doctors and patients don’t change their ways, and fast. As a direct result of such abuse, antibiotics are becoming increasingly less effective against potentially fatal bacteria. If this pattern persists, said Health Chief Dame Sally Davies, more people could die from routine medical procedures like heart surgery.
“Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness at a rate that is alarming and irreversible – similar to global warming,” Davies said. In the absence of a major reduction in the use of antibiotics, she warns that certain untreatable conditions may spread, while other difficult-to-treat infections like multi-resistant E-coli will take more lives. She suggests that doctors and patients must work together to combat this growing antibiotic resistance.
Patients must stop expecting or requesting antibiotics prescriptions from their doctors for mild infections and minor illnesses like coughs, sore throats and earaches, said Dr. Cliodna McNulty, a microbiologist at the Health Protection Agency. And doctors, too, should take extra care to help educate their patients about the consequences of using antibiotics.
Antibiotics 101 – What doctors aren’t telling you
The fact is that antibiotics do nothing at all for viral infections. They are completely ineffective against most of the conditions for which they are prescribed, like coughs, fevers and the like, which have simply to run their course and eventually heal on their own. In fact, fevers are the body’s own natural attempt to burn up toxic invaders. Still, doctors sometimes prescribe antibiotics anyway, either to prevent a secondary bacterial infection, or at the blind and sometimes angry insistence of patients and parents who don’t know any better.
What antibiotics are indiscriminately effective at is killing bacteria – all bacteria. This may rid a person of the unwanted harmful bacteria, yes, but with the likely more harmful result that friendly bacteria are destroyed as well, the kind necessary to all manner of vital biological functions, such as digestion, absorption of nutrients and the development of immune strength. The unnecessary disruption of this delicate internal ecological balance, especially for children, is therefore a terrible mistake wit….
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