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Antibiotic-resistant bacteria spreading by Dick Peterson Public Relations Antibiotics are good. They save lives. Use them improperly, and they can be harmful. Lives can be lost. Beth Rhoton Give her half a chance and MUSC’s Beth Rhoton, R.N., a member of the South Carolina Careful Antibiotic Use Taskforce, C.A.Use, will tell you how harmful they can be and why. She carries the C.A.Use banner throughout the Lowcountry as part of a statewide campaign to slow the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections among children. “We’re the antibiotic generation,” she said. “Since the early 1940s, antibiotics have been available for mass distribution and we’ve benefitted greatly. And along with vaccines, we’ve managed to wipe out many serious infectious childhood diseases and their effects.” Trouble is, the bacteria are catching on. The all-too-often inadequate or frivolous use of antibiotics is turning out some super-bugs that leap antibiotic barriers in a single bound. Dangerously resistant bacteria have biomedical investigators searching for more effective antibiotics—a kind of super kryptonite—to kill the super-bugs. How many times have you heard, “If I can just give him an antibiotic, I can get him back to daycare tomorrow?” Pediatricians and family practice physicians hear it all the time from parents whose career-childcare-commute balancing acts are upset by runny noses, sore throats and fevers. And so starts a scenario that Rhoton blames—at least in part—for the rise in dangerously resistant bacteria. The parent demands antibiotics; the doctor responds with a prescription for an antibiotic he knows won’t help against a virus. The doctor also recommends a regimen of Tylenol to lower the fever, cough syrup for the sore throat and lots of fluids. You guessed it. The child gets better. The antibiotic gets the credit. Never mind that antibiotics work on bacteria and have no effect on colds. “Here’s what happens,” Rhoton explained. “Viruses have to run their course; it’s the body’s own immune system that eventually shuts down the cold.” Meanwhile, the unnecessary use of the antibiotic is like giving the enemy a chance to examine a new weapons system and build its defenses against it.  Even when antibiotics are necessary to eliminate a bacterial infection, a dramatic, one-day improvement can leave a patient thinking the rest of the prescription isn’t needed, so the rest of the prescription is forgotten. But lurking in the body are severely weakened—but not dead—bacteria that live by the motto, “What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.” Rhoton said she has seen children in the hospital suffering under the ravages of bacterial infections that few, if any, antibiotics will touch. In some cases, the children are consigned to live the rest of their lives with the threat of recurrent infections from bacteria that refuse to be defeated. Rhoton has carried the message of how the unnecessary use of antibiotics can harm children to health care professionals, parents and the general public. She has appeared on Channel Five’s Health Connection in Charleston and was part of a community education program April 27 at Wando High School. Her presentations and printed educational materials include helpful information on how parents and child care providers can work together with health care providers to reverse the serious problem of antibiotic resistance.