In every second infection of the ENT sphere (ear, nose, throat), doctors unnecessarily prescribe antibiotics to children. This is what an analysis carried out over 10 years concludes.
Too many antibiotics are still prescribed unnecessarily. A meta-analysis, to appear in the October edition of the journal Pediatrics, concludes that doctors use these drugs too widely for children. Its authors denounce in particular the lack of means available to city medicine to distinguish viral and bacterial infections.
A team from the Seattle Children’s Hospital (Washington State, United States) reviewed studies conducted between 2000 and 2011 to assess the prevalence of acute infections of the ENT sphere (ear infections, sinusitis, bronchitis, pharyngitis and upper respiratory tract infections) in underage patients. The researchers also reviewed the available data on visits for the same infections over the same period, in order to estimate the rate of prescriptions for antibiotics.
The threat of antibiotic resistance
Over 10 years, acute ear or respiratory tract infections were bacterial in 27% of cases. However, doctors prescribed antibiotics in 57% of cases … twice as much as needed. The remainder of the infections being of viral origin, the recourse to these drugs was however useless, point out the authors of the study. Thus, each year, 11.4 million prescriptions would be established unnecessarily. More worrying: this estimate has not changed one iota over the last decade, despite warnings from health authorities.
If they clearly encourage prescribing wisely, the researchers recognize the predicament of general practitioners. They have no tool to distinguish a viral infection from a bacterial infection, apart from the StreptoTest, which explains this massive over-prescription. There is therefore an urgent need to develop rapid tests in this direction. As we know, too systematic recourse to antibiotics promotes the development of bacterial resistance. And the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the alert very officially: antibiotic resistance is a threat that has become very real, and it could send medicine back to the Middle Ages if nothing is done.
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