Antibiotics: the right reflexes to ensure they remain effective
Antibiotics save millions of lives, but their effectiveness is waning to the point where common infections and minor injuries can become serious again. To ensure that their effectiveness continues and saves lives, here's our advice on how to use them properly.
Only use them when they are needed
Around 30-50% of prescriptions are unnecessary: antibiotics are completely ineffective against viral infections such as influenza, rhinopharyngitis, ear infections, tonsillitis, sinusitis and bronchitis.
Similarly, urinary tract infections with no clinical signs should not be treated in this way, even though this is often the case, particularly in care homes. Professor Jean Carlet's report suggests creating "non-prescription prescriptions" to explain this to patients.
These "special" drugs should be prescribed in dribs and drabs, if possible after a diagnostic test to validate the treatment. Rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) exist for angina, for example. Furthermore, treatment should never be prolonged without a new medical diagnosis.
Continue treatment to the end
Antibiotics first destroy the most sensitive bacteria. Stopping treatment before the end, or taking insufficient doses, means leaving the field open to superbugs, which then transmit their resistance to neighbouring bacteria like a kind of "flu", and strike the weakened patient (immuno-compromised, in intensive care, affected by a chronic disease such as diabetes or cystic fibrosis, etc.), a person hospitalised during an ordinary operation (promiscuity in hospital) or even in the city.
Choose meat, milk, eggs... from animal-friendly sources
Organic farming guarantees animals the space to move around.
Conversely, the concentration of animals stressed by intensive farming conditions encourages the spread of microbes, leading farmers to use massive doses of antibiotics in 80% of cases as a preventive measure. When resistant germs develop, they can be transmitted to humans, to the farmer directly or to the consumer via the food chain. Organic farming favours phytotherapy treatments.
Wash your hands in the event of an epidemic and ventilate
Direct contact is the primary vector of contamination, including resistant bacteria. Strict hand hygiene has halved the number of methicillin-resistant staphylococci in fifteen years. It works at home too!
Take opened medicines back to the pharmacy
Resistant bacteria can contaminate any organism living in nature. If you flush the leftovers down the toilet or put them in the bin at the end of treatment, you run the risk of seeing them find their way back into the water tables, fields or oceans where the animals we eat grow. Only specific channels can recycle them without risk.
Ban pesticides in the home
The excessive use of disinfectants and biocides contributes to the cross-breeding of resistance to antibiotics from the same family. It's better to opt for ecological solutions.