MRSA Notes

If you are the scientist type and love to read about double blind studies, you can read this study from the British Medical Journal - Effectiveness of discontinuing antibiotic treatment after three days versus eight days in mild to moderate-severe community acquired pneumonia: randomised, double blind study. What they did, and what scares me, is they wanted to compare the effects of using a classic 10 day full term of antibiotics with using antibiotics for 3 days - and were studying the effectiveness on community acquired pneumonia. Their hypothesis is that using antibiotics for a shorter term is going to do just as good of a job healing people AND it is going to help with the problem of antibiotic resistance. However, in my mind, and from what I have learned, using them for too short of a term is what is causing the problem in the first place. If you don’t use them long enough, you don’t kill all of the bacteria, and as we all know - What doesn’t kill them makes them stronger.

What do you think - am I wrong? (I might be - I often am. LOL)

[Edit - Here is what Infection Control Today has to say about the subject. They seem all for it, but I have yet to understand why. I hope someone will enlighten me.]