Via Instapundit: Scientists from the UK caused quite a stir this week, when they announced that we don’t necessarily need to complete a full course of antibiotics in order to treat infections properly. It’s a provocative message, but skeptics say their advice is grossly premature—and even reckless.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is not caused by putting an early stop to a prescribed course of antibiotics, but by antibiotic overuse, argue a team of infectious disease experts in The British Medical Journal. The team, led by Martin Llewelyn of the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, is asking doctors, educators, and policy makers to “stop advocating ‘complete the course’ when communicating with the public.”
Which, wow. This is a complete turn-around from what we’ve been told for years—that we need to finish our bottles right down to the last pill in order to properly treat our infections and prevent the proliferation of microbial resistant bacteria. According to these experts, we’ve been wrong about this, and what’s more, the “complete the course” culture may be responsible for the rapid decline in antibiotic effectiveness.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is not caused by putting an early stop to a prescribed course of antibiotics, but by antibiotic overuse, argue a team of infectious disease experts in The British Medical Journal. The team, led by Martin Llewelyn of the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, is asking doctors, educators, and policy makers to “stop advocating ‘complete the course’ when communicating with the public.”
Which, wow. This is a complete turn-around from what we’ve been told for years—that we need to finish our bottles right down to the last pill in order to properly treat our infections and prevent the proliferation of microbial resistant bacteria. According to these experts, we’ve been wrong about this, and what’s more, the “complete the course” culture may be responsible for the rapid decline in antibiotic effectiveness.
(Link to more)
3 comments:
Single payer.
It'll do for you what it did for Charlie Gard.
When you're running a single-payer system like Britain's NHS, it's an easy call. Shaving a week off a course of antibiotics, multiplied by millions of patients, gives you a significant and immediate cost savings, at an unquantifiable risk of creating superbugs, maybe, in the future. Slow-motion Death Panels.
I guess it's a good thing that he didn't go his usual full snark with the I-thought-the-science-was-settled tagline.
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