Antiobiotics and resistant disease strains

Sitting here today looking at all the articles in the paper on antibiotics really got me thinking about the relationship we the public have with our GP’s and other healthcare professionals. When we feel ill and are experiencing chills, and fevers, aches and pains and sniffles and coughs we try to get over it most of the time. Then when we see no other course of action we attend the GP if we can afford it. Having paid approximately €50 for the ten minutes visit is it any wonder that we have an expectation that we will be given the cure for our ailment. After all we don’t want to feel as if we are coming away empty handed do we? More often than not the cure is a prescription for an antibiotic even though our GP will most likely have told us that its viral, we may have preassurised them into writing the script and we probably had a conversation along the lines of “look I won’t use it unless I have to”. So who is wrong?, us the patient for wanting a visible possibility of a cure or the GP who tries to reassure us by providing the script. Possibly both parties are to some degree to blame, but another interesting component of resistance to antibiotics may be coming from another source altogether – that of the food we eat. As consumers we have been trained over previous decades to demand high quality food. What is interesting is that very often we assume that if it looks good then it is good. This is quite a false premise really as most vegetables do not grow perfectly formed of a similar shape and size if grown in their natural environment. Maybe it’s time for us all to consider not only our behavior in terms of wanting antibiotics but also examine the link between the food we eat and our health, and to question if the continuous prophylactic use of antibiotics in the production of food is having an impact on the fight against incurable, antimicrobial-resistant disease strains. More information is available from the link below:

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/agribusiness-and-food/fresh-concerns-over-use-of-antibiotics-in-farming-1.1314552