Appropriate Antibiotic Use: Part I

It’s no secret that antibiotics are becoming less and less effective. The Centers for Disease Control launched a campaign to educate both doctors and the general public about antibiotic use and to cajole them into actually doing the right thing. I think this is a hugely important issue, so I’m going to devote a few posts to it. I’ll start with the one I see most: upper respiratory infections, or URIs.

In the general population, virtually all sporadic infections of the upper respiratory tract are self-limited viral infections, usually the common cold. Since antibiotics don’t treat viruses, you’d think doctors wouldn’t prescribe them for such problems, but they do. Alot. In fact, doctors prescribed $1.1 billion worth of antibiotics for URIs last year, and nearly all of those were unnecessary. Aside from the waste of money, the biggest problem for overprescribing antibiotics is resistance. The more we use antibiotics, the more bacteria become resistant to them. So, if we want them to work when we need them, we need to use them only when needed.