Improving our “stewardship” of antibiotics is key to preventing bacteria from gaining resistance to the essential drugs.
Antibiotics treat infections caused by bacteria — but bacteria can evolve to resist these essential drugs. Over time, the misuse of antibiotics has rapidly accelerated the spread of such resistant germs, and widely used antibiotics are becoming less effective.
So until alternative drugs to antibiotics are developed, how can we slow the rise of bacterial “superbugs”? The answer: Antibiotic stewardship.
Antibiotic stewardship aims to curb the misuse of antibiotics that drives bacteria to develop resistance in the first place. It involves setting clear principles for how doctors prescribe antibiotics and how patients use them in different settings, such as hospitals and nursing homes, and closely tracking whether those principles are followed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The goal is to deter doctors from prescribing antibiotics for viral infections, which the drugs can’t treat, or giving a patient a “broad-spectrum” antibiotic capable of killing many bacteria when a “narrow-spectrum” drug would work, for example. Broad-spectrum antibiotics pose a particular problem because they push a wide range of bacteria in the body to evolve resistance. And once they pick up new tools of resistance, the drug-resistant bugs can easily share them with a slew of additional bacteria.
“When we give lots of antibiotics, or we give more broad antibiotics than are necessary, then you will breed more antibiotic resistance in a patient and in our populations,” Dr. Shruti Gohil, a lead investigator of four INSPIRE-ASP Trials — federally funded research aimed at curbing the overuse of antibiotics in hospitals — told Live Science.
