97 Percent of Doctors Are Concerned About Antibiotic Overuse
Over two million people get sick because of resistance to antibiotics each year, and doctors want that to change.
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Amelia Rosch is an intern for ThinkProgress.
CRE bacteria is responsible for 600 deaths a year and cannot be treated by antibiotics.
CREDIT: AP Images/Center for Disease Control and Prevention
Nearly 100 percent of doctors are concerned about the growth of multi-drug resistant infections from the overuse of antibiotics, a study released last week by Consumers Report found. Almost 30 percent of surveyed doctors had a patient either suffer severe complications or die as a result of a multi-drug resistant bacterial infection.
The study, which surveyed 500 doctors who regularly prescribe antibiotics, found that 85 percent have had a patient with this type of infection in the past year. Doctors are working to turn these trends around; the participants in the study said they’ve taken steps like refusing to prescribe non-necessary antibiotics and prescribing them for the shortest possible time. The American Academy of Pediatrics has also told doctors to be more careful when diagnosing infections to prevent prescribing antibiotics for viral infections.
Ninety three percent of the doctors also said that they were worried about the use of antibiotics in livestock; around 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States are fed to animals being raised for food. These antibiotics are often used to increase animal growth, not to combat diseases, and have been linked to drug-resistant infections in humans. Nonetheless, the Food and Drug Administration has reviewed fewer than 10 percent of the antibiotics used in animals for their risk of creating drug-resistant “superbugs.”
It is not just American doctors who are worried about the overuse of antibiotics. Last Wednesday, the World Health Organization said that the “crisis” of drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis continues with over 400,000 new cases. WHO said that while only 3.5 of people with TB have a drug resistant form, only 48 percent of sufferers are successfully cured of it.
In Europe, campaigns that promote ending the unnecessary use of antibiotics have seen some success. A 2002 campaign in France led to a 26.5 percent decrease in prescriptions of antibiotics over five years. A similar campaign in Belgium led to a 36 percent decrease in prescriptions. Public Health England, a branch of England’s Department of Health, recently launched the “Antibiotic Guardian” campaign which asks people to take a pledge to reduce their use of unnecessary antibiotics. But the meat industry in the U.S. remains less regulated than Europe’s.
A study released earlier in October found that livestock is not the only food source treated with antibiotics. Antibiotics were also found in wild fish and fish that were marketed as “antibiotic free.” While all the antibiotics were below legal limits, the study leader said that since they were present even after the fish was processed and frozen, the original levels were higher.
According to that study, several types of farmed fish were found to contain tetracycline, a type of antibiotics used in humans. Feeding chickens a type of tetracycline may have contributed to last year’s antibiotic-resistant salmonella outbreak, an investigative piece by Reuters found.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that over two million people get sick and 23,000 die annually from drug-resistant infections. CRE-based infections, which have high antibiotic resistance, have increased by 500 percent between 2008 and 2012.
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An African Country That’s 0.3 Percent White Now Has A White President
“He is a black man in a white man’s skin,” Nathan Phiri, a bus driver, told Reuters.
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CREDIT: AP
Africa has a white head of state for the first time since the apartheid regime collapsed in South Africa 20 years ago.
Guy Scott, a Cambridge-educated economist, was named interim president of Zambia on Wednesday after the country’s president, Michael Sata, died in a London hospital at the age of 77.
A former farmer and legislator, Scott previously served as the country’s Minister of Agriculture and oversaw recovery of a severe drought in the 1990s.
“The period of national mourning will start today. We will miss our beloved president and comrade,” Scott said in a televised address. “Elections for the office of president will take place within 90 days. In the interim I am acting president.”
Ninety days may be all he gets because of a “parentage clause” in the country’s constitution which requires the president to be a third generation Zambian.
Although Scott was born in Northern Rhodesia, the British protectorate which became Zambia in 1964, his parents were born in Scotland. This may be a sticking point for his opponents in the coming election. Analysts believe that he will be allowed to serve as interim president because of the country’s line of succession which is also outlined by the Zambian constitution but not allowed to run for president in the coming months.
As one of only about 40,000 white people in a country of 13 million, race is something that came up often for Scott — and for Sata too.
“Michael’s very clever,” Scott told the Guardian about his former “boss” President Sata. “He knows people tend to regard him as a racist because he talks rough.”
But, Scott continued, “He’s usually tried it out on me already. He says things like, ‘What would you be if you weren’t white?’ I said, ‘The president?’ That shut him up.”
On how he’s received by other African leaders, Scott said, “I think they regard me as a sort of mascot, a good luck charm for African politics.”
Not everyone is concerned with Scott’s lineage or race, though.
“He is a black man in a white man’s skin,” Nathan Phiri, a bus driver, told Reuters. “The very fact we accepted him as vice-president shows that we consider him as one of us.”
It’s unclear who will run for the president from the popular Patriotic Front party, and several ministers began to vie for power after Sata became ill. Paired with the constitutional eligibility standards are enforced against Scott.
“There is a bit of a fight in the Patriotic Front to see who’s going to be the candidate and there’s been a lot of jockeying and positioning,” Gary van Staden, a political analyst at Paarl, told Bloomberg. “That’s all a bit open at the moment.”
President Sata was a controversial figure who earned the name “King Cobra” for his defiant and sharp tongued approach to politics. Zambia is largely dependent on its copper mining industry, and Sata gained clout for his criticism of foreign investors.
On the campaign trail in 2011, Sata said that he would punish Chinese managers who shot 13 workers who protested their wages in 2010 but the charges were later quietly dropped.
Although Sata promised to tackle corruption and create jobs, his time in office was marred by economic decline and a crackdown on opposition politicians.
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