When your child has a cold or the flu, you may be tempted take her to the doctor and get a prescription for antibiotics.
Heck, we frequently do the same for ourselves.
It’s a choice that science now shows us can have far-reaching and dire consequences.
When penicillin was discovered in 1928 and sulfa drugs a few years later, antibiotics were considered wonder drugs. And they were.
Antibiotics have their place. They have saved countless lives from bacterial infections.
But when antibiotics are used inappropriately, as they are so often today, they can have massively negative side effects and even lead to fatal infections, untreatable because of antibiotic resistance.
Here’s what most people do not know:
Antibiotics are useless against colds and flu. Colds and flu (and most ear aches and sore throats) are caused by viruses. Antibiotics kill bacteria and are completely ineffective against viruses. Asking your doctor for antibiotics for a child’s cold can cause serious side effects, including obesity, digestive disorders, asthma and perhaps autism.
Pediatricians and primary care doctors are free with prescriptions for antibiotic, often because concerned parents demand them for their sick children. The desire to protect children is instinctive, but in the case of antibiotics, it may have exactly the opposite effect.
Studies have linked antibiotic use in infants six months old or less to obesity and overweight. The startling findings of a New York University study followed 11,500 children from birth to age 7.
What’s more, children who received even one course of antibiotics by age four (and what child hasn’t?) nearly double their risk of developing bowel disease and other digestive disorders later in life, Danish researchers found
And the risk of digestive diseases increases by 12 percent every time the child gets antibiotics.
If that’s not bad enough, Yale researchers found that a single prescription for antibiotic for an infant under six months of age may increase the risk of developing asthma by 40%. A second course of antibiotics can increase the asthma risk by 70%.
There have even been a small number of studies linking autism with the use of amoxicillin for otitis media, a common ear problem in young children.
The there’s the issue of antibiotic resistance.
Each time you or you child take antibiotics, you increase the chances that bacteria in your body will be able to resist them. Antibiotic resistance is one of the most daunting challenges of modern medicine. In general, an infection that does not respond to the first course of treatment with antibiotics will require treatment with a different antibiotic.
But some infections like the MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) strains that have become distressingly common in hospitals, are resistant to several kinds of antibiotics.
Later, you could get an infection that those antibiotics cannot cure. MRSA is just one of several organisms that cause infections resistant to several common antibiotics.
As the World Health Organization (WHO) notes, “Infections caused by resistant microorganisms often fail to respond to conventional treatment, resulting in prolonged illness, greater risk of death and higher costs. The death rate for patients with serious infections treated in hospitals is about twice that in patients with infections caused by non-resistant bacteria.”
The bottom line: Be proactive. Don’t ask for antibiotics for you or your child for a cold or flu. Don’t ask for them to “prevent” side effects. And if your doctor or your child’s doctor wants to prescribe antibiotics, insist on a culture to confirm that the infection is bacterial.
