Antibiotic Overuse and Microbial Resistance

www.iatrogenic.org/library/antibioticlib.html

CDC: Antibiotic resistance"Antibiotics, also known as antimicrobial drugs, are drugs that fight infections caused by bacteria. After their discovery in the 1940's they transformed medical care and dramatically reduced illness and death from infectious diseases. However, over the decades the bacteria that antibiotics control have developed resistance to these drugs. Today, virtually all important bacterial infections in the United States and throughout the world are becoming resistant. For this reason, antibiotic resistance is among CDC's top concerns."

CDC: Campaign to Prevent Antimicrobial Resistance in Healthcare Settings- Each year nearly 2 million patients in the United States get an infection in a hospital.- Of those patients, about 90,000 die as a result of their infection.- More than 70% of the bacteria that cause hospital-acquired infections are resistant to at least one of the drugs most commonly used to treat them.
More than 50 million unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions are written each year in the United States for patients outside of hospitals, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
It is striking how reticent the CDC is to place blame on physicians, who are primarily responsible for the mass overuse of antibiotics, and totally responsible for their over prescription. The medical director for CDC's National Campaign for Appropriate Antibiotic Use, Richard Besser, M.D., is quoted thusly on the CDC site: "The biggest problem is inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics. Up to 40% of antibiotics prescribed in doctor's offices are for viral infections, which are not treatable with antibiotics. There are many reason's for this, including demand from patients, time pressure on physicians, and diagnostic uncertainty." Dr. Besser deftly avoids citing the major reason for the overuse of antibiotics, that physicians irresponsibly prescribe them when they are neither needed nor effective. Can we expect the CDC's campaign to be effective if it neglects the main cause of antibiotic resistance? The claim that "demand from patients" is a major reason for "inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics," is nonsensense. A physician who prescribes a drug which he knows to be inappropriate is behaving irresponsibly and unethically. He should cease the practice of medicine. Physicians have demanded and received complete control over the dispensing of most drugs, but they seek to avoid responsibility for the consequences of this paternalism.

Editor’s notes: Wow, you need to visit the site. They lay the blame for the overuse of antibiotics on the Medical profession with a very large stick. This should be headlines in the news! About time someone started telling the truth!!!