Canberra, Friday January 4 2002

Experts call for new prescribing policies to curb rising antibiotic resistance

A Canberra-based study published this week in the British Medical Journal, has for the first time measured the level of antibiotic-resistant bugs in small children caused by routine prescribing of antibiotics. The study showed that the more antibiotics a child had, the more likely they were to carry an antibiotic-resistant bug.

The research team from The Australian National University and the Canberra Hospital included two doctoral students, Dr Dilruba Nasrin and Ms Eileen Wilson, and was led by ANU Emeritus Professor Bob Douglas and Dr Peter Collignon from The Canberra Hospital. The group worked closely with 50 general practitioners and the parents of 461 child patients monitoring a common bacterium, Pneumococcus, in the noses of the children over a two-year period.

“The likelihood of children carrying a resistant bug was clearly related to the amount of antibiotics they had taken in the six months prior to their nasal swab,” Professor Douglas said.

The study showed that each day of antibiotic use in the previous six months increased the odds of a child carrying a resistant bug by 4 per cent. The results of the study have prompted the authors to call for urgent reforms to prescribing policies.

“Our results suggest that a substantial reduction of antibiotic use in preschool children could quickly reduce the carriage rates of penicillin-resistant bacteria,” Dr Collignon said. “The general community prevalence of penicillin-resistant organisms would probably fall if we could reduce the unnecessary prescription of these drugs for common viral respiratory infections in early childhood.”

Dr Collignon said this would require a change in attitude to antibiotic use both among doctors and their patients.

“Doctors and patients have generally felt that treating respiratory infections with antibiotics might sometimes do some good, but would probably not harm the patient. What these results now show is that unnecessary prescription could conceivably be harmful because the child may go on to develop Pneumococcus bacteria that would be resistant to antibiotics.”

Contact: Dr Peter Collignon at The Canberra Hospital on (02) 6244 2222 or
Leah Slattery, ANU Public Affairs, on (02) 6125 6125.

02/2002

© 2000 Marketing & Communications Division,
The Australian National University.
Questions or Comments?

Last Modified Tue, July 16, 2002