GPs 'pressured' over antibiotics
Almost half of GPs have admitted prescribing antibiotics even though they know they will not treat the patient's condition, a British survey shows.
Ninety per cent of doctors who responded to a recent questionnaire said they felt pressure from patients to hand out the medications.
The Longitude Prize survey compiled responses from 1004 GPs across the UK, and found 28 per cent had prescribed antibiotics several times a week even when they were not sure if it was medically necessary, and 45 per cent had done so knowing they would not help.
The findings come after experts at Public Health England and University College London revealed earlier this month that the number of patients given antibiotics for minor ailments has soared in recent years.
While 36 per cent of patients were given antibiotics for coughs and colds in 1999, by 2011 this figure had soared to 51 per cent, the study published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy found.
Last month, Prime Minister David Cameron said that resistance to antibiotics was a "very real and worrying threat" as he pledged to put Britain at the forefront of the fight against drug-immune bacteria threatening to send medicine "back to the dark ages".
The latest research comes ahead of the STG10 million ($A18.25 million) Longitude Prize which will open later this year for entries to find an easy and cost-effective test for bacterial infections that doctors can use to determine if and when to give out antibiotics.
Seventy per cent of GPs surveyed said they prescribed because they were not sure whether the patient had a viral or bacterial infection, and 24 per cent said it was because there was a lack of easy-to-use diagnostic tools.
Media medico Rosemary Leonard said she understood the pressures GPs were faced with to prescribe antibiotics when they were not needed.
"The more antibiotics taken, the more resistant bacteria come to them," Dr Leonard said.
"Antibiotic resistance is a real issue and more needs to be done to conserve antibiotics for the future.
"Diagnostics play a valuable role in making this happen. Not only can diagnostics help determine the type of infection someone has, they could gather valuable data and aid the global surveillance efforts."
Tamar Ghosh, who leads the Longitude Prize, said accurate diagnostic tools could help curb the unnecessary use of antibiotics across the globe.
"In the next five years, the Longitude Prize aims to find a cheap and effective diagnostic tool that can be used anywhere in the world," Ms Ghosh said.
"We recognise that stemming the misuse and overuse of antibiotics is just one piece of the jigsaw to slow bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
"Nevertheless it's an important step when we could be waiting many years for other solutions, including novel alternatives to antibiotics coming to the market."
Just six per cent of 1074 patients surveyed by Populus earlier this month said they would push their GPs to give them antibiotics, despite a higher number of doctors saying they felt under pressure to do so.
