Cold season comes and goes, bringing sniffles and rounds of half empty bottles of antibiotics. Doctors try to stress the importance of finishing an entire round of antibiotics, but as soon as people start feeling better; the bottle goes back into the medicine cabinet just in case they get a relapse.
What some people don’t know is not finishing antibiotics leads to over-prescribing antibiotics, which leads to virulent mutated strains of antibiotics that modern medicine is having a hard time keeping up with.
Not to sound too motherly or preachy, but the antibiotic resistance problem has some people worried. The problem extends beyond people just not washing their hands enough or not finishing their antibiotics, while those are still common sense factors, it has gone to the Legislature to restrict the use of antibiotics on factory farm animals, like chickens, pigs, cows and other animals in agriculture.
Antibiotics that are injected for “non-therapeutic” uses in farm animals are a way for factory farms to get the animals to grow faster and survive infections from immense overcrowding.
Injecting animals with such high levels of antibiotics makes the bacteria invading their systems immune to the certain type of antibiotics and renders stronger and harder to kill colonies of bacteria. Before long, the bacteria are circulating in the open public, creating havoc for doctors.
The Antibiotics Overuse Act was sent before the House of Representative and U.S. Senate detailing measures to prevent bacterial epidemics before they get a chance to begin.
While some people think what goes on in other countries does not affect the United States, when people are dealing with bacteria and widespread disease, our neighbors become much closer.
The World Health Organization is concerned about the rising levels of resistant bacteria in areas of the world where sanitation is lax, clean water supplies are limited and overcrowding is a reality of daily life.
With people in such close proximity to one another, bacterial infections are spread easily.
What Americans don’t think about is this problem only thought to plague third world countries could quickly spread to the United States. So the World Health Organization issued its Global Strategy for Containment of Antimicrobial Resistance, a document aimed at policy-makers in developed countries to take action to help contain antibiotic resistance.
WHO experts agree that a global system of antibiotic resistance tracking is needed to locate “hot spots” of particularly stubborn bacteria and to see if educational efforts are working in these areas.
Back in Baton Rouge, over on Infirmary Road, the Student Health Center pharmacy distributed 36,245 individual common antibiotic pills between January 2003 and January 2004, said Carolyn Lancon, pharmacy supervisor.
While this looks like a lot of pills, a normal prescription contains between 21 to 30 pills for a 7 to 10 day dosage, Lancon said. When averaged out, approximately 13 percent of LSU’s population received some form of the commonly prescribed antibiotics including Trimox, Cephalexin, Doxycycline, E.E.S. and Zithromax commonly known as a Z-pack.
They were prescribed for upper respiratory infections, skin infections and sinus infections mostly, she said.
When asked if the Health Center has an “antibiotic policy” advocated by the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics to ensure antibiotic distributing procedures do not compound the antibiotic resistance problem, Lancon said the Health Center monitors and tracks prescriptions and the doctors keep abreast of common infectious diseases that afflict college aged students so they can make proper diagnoses.
So what can Joe Blow student do?
Take all your pills and wash your hands.