New Research That Can Help Put An End To Useless Antibiotics Unveiled

If you head to your doctor with a fever and cough or other signs you’re getting sick, there’s a good chance your doctor will prescribe antibiotics without knowing what’s behind it.

There are certain diseases such as bacterial pneumonia and when you visit the hospital for respiratory viruses like the common cold and sinus infections, your doctor might send you home with antibiotics prescription.

The problem with this is that antibiotics only target bacteria and won’t do anything to fight a virus. According to the CDC, despite the fact above, 30 percent of antibiotics prescriptions are for viral infections.

Not only are antibiotics completely useless against viruses, they could also cause major consequences.

 

Antibiotics kill most of the bacteria behind your infection—but not all of them. The bacteria that are strong enough to survive will multiply to create more bacteria that are resistant to treatment, too.

Over time, this means you will have more resistant bacteria than the ones that antibiotics can kill, so the infections will be harder to treat. Furthermore, if you take antibiotics when you don’t need to, or use antibacterial soap, you’re speeding up the process. Eventually, diseases that used to be easy to treat with antibiotics could become dangerous again.

The good news is that researchers might have found a way to tell the difference between bacterial and viral infections, so your doctor won’t have to prescribe a useless antibiotic. In a study in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers took blood from 94 patients who had lower respiratory tract infections.

Laboratory tests found genetic markers in the blood that could correctly figure out if an infection was viral or bacterial 80 to 90 percent of the time.

However, due to the fact that the sample size for the research was small, more tests will be needed before doctors can start using this diagnosis method in their offices. But if it does take off, it will be a lot easier than testing for specific diseases.

Co-author of the study Thomas Mariani, PhD, pediatrics and biomedical genetics professor at University of Rochester Medical Center said, “Our genes react differently to a virus than they do to bacteria, rather than trying to detect the specific organism that’s making an individual sick, we’re using genetic data to help us determine what’s affecting the patient and when an antibiotic is appropriate or not.”