If you’re at all concerned that we’re not using our antibiotic appropriately, then this will come as a disturbing report
It was presented at a European conference and it showed that in Belgium, kids under the age of 5 who visit an ER for a sore throat are overwhelmingly likely to get an antibiotic prescription for that complaint, probably because, I’d guess, in a busy ER, where the attention of most doctors is geared to not missing anything important in the seriously ill, it’s much easier to get rid of a cranky kid with a sore throat and his or her worried set of parents with a prescription for something, even if that prescription is useless than it is to sit down with them to delineate the many reasons they really don’t need an antibiotic.
But why is this disturbing?
Couple of reasons at least.
Kids under the age of 5 are very unlikely to be suffering from strep throat, by far the most common reason to give out antibiotics for a sore throat – kids that young are nearly always suffering from a viral infection, for which antibiotics are not only useless, but worse, they also of course can produce significant negative consequences, such as for example, increasing her risk of ending up with a C difficile infection.
Just as disturbing to me, though, was the finding that Dutch residents on call in ER hospitals were even more likely than their Belgian counterparts to be inappropriate dispensers of antibiotics, and the reason that should catch your attention is that if there’s one country where doctors are taught very forcefully to be cautious about using antibiotic prescriptions more cautiously than in the past, it’s Holland, one of the first countries to have raised the red flag of antibiotic overuse.
So if Dutch doctors haven’t really bought into this precaution, how likely is it that doctors from other countries where such lessons are not taught and re-taught nearly as forcefully will also stop prescribing antibiotics for viral infections?
Not blood likely, I think.
