Antibiotics Are a Gift to Be Handled With Care

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Antibiotics Are a Gift to Be Handled With Care

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

I should start by saying as clearly as I can that I love antibiotics. Recently I had dinner with a pediatrician friend, and she told me the story of the day's sickest child. Before she sent the child to the emergency room in an ambulance, she told me, she gave her 50 milligrams per kilogram of ceftriaxone, a powerful antibiotic.

"You probably saved her life," I said, and my friend nodded; it was possible. Antibiotics represent a huge gift in the struggle against infant and child mortality, a triumph (or actually, many triumphs) of human ingenuity and science over disease and death, since the antibiotic era began back in the fourth and fifth decades of the 20th century.

But new research is looking at questions about the complex effects of antibiotics - on bacteria, on individual children and on populations - building on a greatly increased awareness of how powerful antibiotics can be, and how important it is to use them judiciously.

Over the past 15 years or so, spurred by new realizations - and new fears - about the risks of breeding resistant strains of bacteria, pediatricians in the United States have, as a group, cut back dramatically on prescribing antibiotics in situations where they may not be necessary. And parents, as a group, have become less likely to demand them.

"It's actually been a remarkable change in practice from the mid-'90s on," said Dr. Jonathan Finkelstein, a pediatrician at Boston Children's Hospital who studies antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance, "and we did that by physicians and patients recognizing that antibiotics are quite effective, quite safe, but there's no such thing as a free lunch, and as with any other medical decision, we have to weigh the risks and benefits of every treatment."

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