PERSPECTIVES
The European Union Antibiotic Awareness Day: the paediatric perspective
Paediatric Infectious Diseases Unit, St George’s Hospital, London, UK
Correspondence to:
Dr N Spyridis, Paediatric Infectious Diseases Unit, 5th Floor, Lanesborough Wing, St George’s Hospital, Blackshaw Road, London SW17 0QT, UK; n.spyridis@sgul.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) has marked 18 November 2008 as the first of the proposed annual European Union (EU) Antibiotic Awareness Days in an attempt to improve the use of antibiotics by families and professionals.
Antibiotics are the most common medicines given to children. In the UK, there are around 6 million antibiotic prescriptions for children each year, the majority given unnecessarily for viral upper respiratory tract infections.1 There is clear evidence linking antibiotic resistance to prescribing, with a possible threshold effect beyond which high prescribing can select resistant isolates.2 Factors such as duration of treatment, dose and class of selected antibiotic3 are important in the resistance chain, along with host susceptibility and pathogen transmissibility.4 Children are an excellent environment for the selection of resistant bacterial pathogens after recent antibiotic use, particularly in day care. As recent studies have suggested, the individual child can host
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