The authors of the study say it’s the first to provide national estimates of temporal trends in antibiotic use among United States hospitals.
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Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) discovered that antibiotic use in hospitals did not change between 2006 and 2012.
Heavy antibiotic use, which causes certain bacteria to grow resistant to both medicine and common treatments, has been one of the medical community’s biggest concerns for quite some time. Though overall antibiotic use stayed the same during the six-year study, the team found that use of third-and-fourth generation cephalosporins, macrolides, glycopeptides, carbapenems, and tetracyclines rose by a large margin.
“A better understanding of antibiotic use in USA hospitals can inform stewardship efforts by identifying targets for reducing inappropriate or unnecessary prescribing”, they write.
‘In the hospital, where the sickest patients are, there’s been an increase in broad-spectrum antibiotics, ‘ said Dr. Ateev Mehrotra of Harvard Medical School, who coauthored a commentary in the journal.
“We want new antibiotics, but probable we’re now not going to invent our way out of this”, Frieden said.
Much of those may come by way of our meat, since 80 percent of the world’s antibiotics go into animal feed, which they ingest and later we eat, says NBC News.
A new study shows that prescription rates did not decrease between 2006 and 2012, despite growing evidence that many drugs given to patients were not actually necessary.
One reason for overprescribing is that it’s easy to do and many doctors figure it might not help, but it won’t hurt, Mehrotra suggested. However, in many countries, people can now get antibiotics without a prescription at all. The CDC estimates that at least a third of antibiotic prescriptions in the USA are unnecessary.
Before the United Nations gathering, Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the nonprofit Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy, is scheduled to hold a meeting of health experts to focus attention on the problem.
Experts in particular fear that misuse of these back-up and last resort drugs will spawn the creation of bacteria that are resistant to all antibiotics-creating invincible superbugs that could cause untreatable infections.
“In fact, we now have many multidrug-resistant infections that are not treatable with any antibiotics we have, and consequently there is now a call for global action to solve the problem”, Laxminarayan said.
Health experts have long anxious about the issue, but it is getting more alarming because germs are getting ever more hard to treat, few new antibiotics are being developed, and the problem appears to be global already.
“In developed nations, too many people are being prescribed antibiotics unnecessarily, while in many developing countries too few have access to these lifesaving drugs”, he said. It could be that physicians are truly encountering more drug-resistant infections or are simply assuming that infections are resistant and treating them accordingly.
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However, it turns out that it was the very successes that Dr. Stewart was touting -including copious use of antibiotics – that resulted in the grave crisis that we face today.
