Do You Always Need Antibiotics?

Our overuse and misuse of antibiotics have given rise to a generation of drug-defying superbugs.

These mutant microbes are rapidly proliferating by hitching a ride on the globalisation of trade and tourism to infect people all over the world.

Havoc looms on the horizon for two simple reasons. First, we have little immunity to these bacteria, because we’ve never met them before (our defences against diseases build over time). Second, these bugs are themselves resistant to our best pharmaceutical weapons.

What kind of havoc? Superbugs have the potential to unleash a pandemic of bubonic-plague proportions. In the 14th century, when trade enabled the Black Death to spread from China to many other countries that hadn’t been exposed to it (including Australia), it took centuries to die down, and it still affects some parts of the world.

Today, the prospect that existing treatments might fail, throwing us back into the pre-antibiotic era’s threat of global plague, seems almost impossible to believe. But the effects of antibiotic impotence are already wideranging. In developing countries, such as Tanzania, antibiotic resistance may be contributing to deaths among children suffering from bloodstream infections. Some of these infections’ mortality rates are more than double those of malaria.

On top of this, research and development into new anti-biotics is in decline. For example, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved only one new antibiotic since 2008, compared with 40 antibiotics from 1983 to 1997, and with 12 antibiotics from 1998 to 2007. At this rate, we have no hope of creating medicines powerful enough to beat the travelling superbugs.

MORE: Antibiotics: Useless By 2030?

It’s important to realise that all of us could be contributing to this medical catastrophe. Two of the riskiest things you can do right now, actions that will affect you, the children you know and generations to come, are: (1) take antibiotics when an illness doesn’t require them, and (2) take antibiotics incorrectly—that is, take them at the wrong dosage or frequency, or fail to finish your prescribed course.

Trust your body to fight

We have some misguided beliefs about antibiotics that we urgently need to overhaul. Our biggest misconception, according to Danielle Stowasser, PhD, clinical adviser to the National Prescribing Service (NPS), is the belief that we need to treat viral respiratory-tract infections (such as common colds and flu) with antibiotics.

In fact, we are born with an immune system that’s designed to recognise and destroy antigens such as viruses and bacteria. We have natural defences—the cough reflex, mucus, skin, stomach acid, and enzymes in tears and skin oil—to help stop these invaders. We also have acquired immunity: once our immune system builds a barrier against a particular virus, we won’t catch it again.

So why do we take antibiotics when we don’t need them? When people pick up a viral infection, they often think that taking an antibiotic will guard against subsequent bacterial infection. They forget that our bodies already have ‘good’ bacterial flora to protect us. Normally, this flora would control the infectious bacteria, but the antibiotics we’re taking destroy these defences, leaving us open to further attack. Trust your body to fight.

MORE: Overdosing on Antibiotics

Ready to become a resistance fighter? The National Prescription Service (NPS) is encouraging all Australians to join the fight against antibiotic resistance. Unless we do, we're at risk of our current antibiotics becoming useless against a large proportion of bacterial infections by 2030. This April the NPS are launching an education campaign. The goal? To reduce antibiotic usage by 25 per cent over the next five years. Visit NPS for more information.