Antibiotics before infections save lives: study

[Guest guest]

Do they really expect us to swallow this? (No pun intended!)

What a load of b*ll! They are determined to medicate the human race to

death!!

http://uk.news.

com/22/20090101/twl-life-us-antibiotics-treatment-9020220.html

Antibiotics before infections save lives: study

2 hours 24 mins ago

Giving antibiotics to patients in intensive care units as a precaution saves

lives, according to a major Dutch study published Wednesday.

The findings in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest the benefits of

administering antibiotics right away, even before an infection develops,

outweigh the risks people will develop resistance to them, the researchers

said.

" We have seen that using antibiotics clearly results in a reduction in the

number of deaths and intensive care units should make use of this knowledge,

Anne Marie de Smet, a researcher at University Medical Center Utrecht, said

in a statement.

Drug-resistant bacteria are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, marked

by the rise of superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus,

or MRSA. Such infections kill about 19,000 people a year in the United

States, while more than 4,000 a year in Britain are infected.

The World Health Organization cites hospital-acquired infections as a major

cause of death and disability worldwide and experts have been saying for

year that poor hospital practices spread dangerous bacteria. At the same

time, doctors are told to cut back on using antibiotics to prevent the rise

of resistant " superbugs. "

The infections can cause life-threatening and disfiguring infections that

can kill within days and can often only be treated with expensive,

intravenous antibiotics. The risk of infection increases the longer people

remain in the hospital.

De Smet and colleagues looked at 6,000 men and women who stayed in intensive

care units for at least two days at 13 hospitals in the Netherlands to

compare the effects of different antibiotic treatments.

Volunteers who received oral antibiotics right away were 11 percent less

likely to die, and those given oral and intravenous combinations right away

were 13 percent less likely to die than people who did not get the drugs,

the researchers found.

At the same time the number of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections did

not increase among the people on the drugs.

Because the researchers tracked deaths 28 days after treatment began, the

next step is looking to see how resistance may develop in the long term.

(Reporting by Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox and Giles Elgood)