Letter to the editor

Thursday’s editorial, “America’s pill-popping pandemic” places too much blame on physicians for the current degree of antibiotic resistance. Every fall, there is a large number of students who seek treatment at health centers for cold-like symptoms. Oftentimes, there is nothing a doctor can do—after all, antibiotics don’t treat viruses. But when a doctor says “no” to a demand for pills, the patient will probably go elsewhere until he gets what he wants: a prescription.

This isn’t to say that antibiotics are never necessary. More than anything, they are abused by the patient. How many times have you or someone you have known stopped taking a prescribed medication before it was gone because he or she felt better? It’s possible that he or she took the prescription just long enough to kill a majority of the bacteria in the body, but left some bacteria behind to pass along heartier DNA. If this happens enough times, it is no wonder that there are resistant strains out there.

Putting antibiotics into soaps is no help, either. The CDC has recognized this problem and had stated that “like antibiotics, these products can select resistant strains and, therefore, overuse in the home can be expected to propagate resistant microbial variants.”

What it ultimately comes down to is that the germ-phobic general population is largely to blame for these “super bugs.” If we use new antibiotics reasonably and responsibly, it is possible that this trend of resistance won’t continue.

Elizabeth Nelson
Senior, biology