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Half of All
Antibiotic Provided in Doctor Offices Are Unnecessary. The above opinion is
from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta as reported in the
American Medical News September 13th 1999 issue.
According to the article, “about 100 million courses of
antibiotics are provided by office-based doctors each year, and up to half
are unnecessary.” The
article specifically investigates one type of antibiotic resistant
bacteria, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus - MRSA for short.
MRSA is becoming a very commonplace infection accounting for
one-third of infections in hospitals and nursing homes.
The growth of MRSA is attributed to over utilization
of antibiotics in general. Timothy
Naimi, MD, MPH, a CDC medical epidemiologist with the Minnesota Dept. of
Health, states it simply, "We very strongly believe that these
[infections] are a byproduct of excessive and otherwise inappropriate use
of antibiotics." The article reports that most documented MRSA
infections now are transmitted in hospitals, where resistant infections
have risen from 2% in 1974 to approximately 50% in 1997.
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