Health

Antibiotics education is working

ATLANTA - Doctors and patients are beginning to curb their use of antibiotics as a result of educational programs, federal health officials said Wednesday.

The inappropriate use of antibiotics has led illness-causing microbes to become resistant to such drugs. Antibiotic resistance is a major public health problem throughout the world and is particularly common among the bacteria that cause ear and respiratory infections.

"We are making progress" against the problem in this country, said Dr. Richard E. Besser, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"When we look at the prescribing data across the nation, we see dramatic declines in prescriptions to children and to adults," Besser said.

Antibiotics are most often prescribed for an inner ear infection known as otitis media, Besser said. From 1980 through 1982, antibiotic prescribing rates for children by office-based physicians increased 48 percent.

In 1999 and 2000, doctors in this country wrote an average of 11-million antibiotic prescriptions for ear infections in children 15 and younger, a spokeswoman for the disease control centers said. But one study showed about a 25 percent reduction, largely among office-based doctors, in prescribing standard antibiotics for children's ear infections. However, the study cautioned that increased prescribing of newer antibiotics might offset the reduction.

Further declines are likely after pediatric and family practice organizations issue new guidelines this spring that will encourage doctors to avoid prescribing antibiotics for ear infections in children, Besser said at the Fourth International Conference on Emerging Infections.

The centers and other health organizations have been conducting educational programs aimed at correcting misconceptions among doctors and the public about antibiotic therapy.

A major problem, many doctors say, is that managed health care plans do not give doctors time to explain to patients why antibiotic therapy is not indicated. Under such circumstances, many doctors contend, pulling out a prescription pad is the easiest solution.

The safety of imported seafood is improving but the Food and Drug Administration must act more quickly to stop shipments of potentially bad fish, says a congressional report released Wednesday.

More than 80 percent of the seafood Americans eat is imported.

The General Accounting Office criticized the FDA in 2001 for its seafood oversight, saying then that far too few seafood suppliers were following safety standards. In Wednesday's report, the GAO cited some improvements, most notably an increase in documented compliance with a crucial anticontamination program, from 27 percent of U.S. importers in 1999 to 48 percent in 2002. But investigators said huge delays persist in alerting border inspectors to check for contamination in shipments from foreign firms that the FDA discovers have serious safety problems.

Sorry, no shortcuts. You probably need at least a 30-minute walk every day if you hope to maintain weight without dieting, a new study finds.

Smaller increases in daily exercise, like a 15-minute walk, simply won't burn up enough calories to compensate for yearly weight gains seen among increasingly overweight populations, Swiss researchers reported Wednesday in the American Journal of Public Health.

Other research has suggested that if overweight people can increase daily exercise sufficiently to burn about 100 calories a day, or cut food intake by that much, they can fend off further weight increase.

For instance, Duke University researchers reported in January that the equivalent of 30 minutes of walking daily was sufficient to prevent weight gain in a group of otherwise inactive people in late middle age. However, the participants' caloric intake remained the same.

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