The News Story - Giving antibiotics to infants is strongly related to illness in adulthood Many news stories in recent years have covered the dangers of overprescribing antibiotics, but a new study reveals the precise way in which giving infants such drugs sets them up them for a lifetime of illness.
Reports TIME, “The antibiotics may alter infant gut bacteria, which are tied to everything from allergies and obesity to infectious diseases.” More specifically, antibiotics appear to alter “critical gut microbiota that determine our vulnerability to a number of infectious diseases.” The story warns that antibiotics “remain the most prevalent drug prescribed to children,” but that “30% of prescriptions are deemed unnecessary.”
 
What this story does not cover, however, is that family breakdown plays a crucial role in decisions to request antibiotics. The New Research - Breeding supergerms Few threats worry public-health officials more than that of new strains of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Epidemiologists increasingly recognize that parents help to foster the emergence of such bacteria when they demand inappropriate prescription of antibiotics. And a new study out of Greece suggests that single parents are particularly likely to request such dubious prescriptions.
 
Conducted by pediatric researchers at the Universities of Thessaly and Athens, this new study focuses particularly on the use of antibiotics for upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs) among children, infections that are “mainly due to viral infections” and therefore not—in general—appropriately treated with antibiotics. The researchers view this “antibiotic misuse” as a misapplication of medicine “contributing to the development of resistant strains of bacterial pathogens and placing a burden on the economy of the health care system.”
 
To identify the parents most likely to ask for such inappropriate antibiotics, the researchers parse data collected from 5,312 parents from across Greece, all with children ages five and six. These data indicate that “being a single parent” was “significantly associated to inadequate knowledge, inappropriate attitudes, and wrong practices” in the use of antibiotics for URTIs.
 
The Greek scholars comment at length on single parents’ inappropriate use of antibiotics: “Single parents [in this study] reported improper attitudes concerning antibiotic use. As it has also been acknowledged . . . it is more difficult to take care of a sick child in single-parent families, especially if other relatives are not available. Thus, one could speculate that single parents expect antibiotic treatment assuming that it will shorten disease duration . . . therefore allowing them to return to their workplace earlier.”
 
Understanding single parents’ mistakes in using antibiotics matters a good deal to the researchers. After all, they point out, “identification of factors influencing antimicrobial prescription in pediatric practice may have a considerable public health impact.”
 
The researchers consider single parents as one of “the main groups of parents that should be targeted in future intervention programs” designed to reduce misuse of antibiotics. And because the spread of microbes resistant to antibiotics has become a global problem, medical authorities have reason to worry about single parents.
 
(Source: Bryce J. Christensen and Nicole M. King, “New Research,” The Family inAmerica, Spring 2013, Vol. 27 Number 2. Study: Sotiria G. Panagakou et al., “Risk Factors of Antibiotic Misuse for Upper Respiratory Tract Infections in Children: Results from a Cross-Sectional Knowledge-Attitude-Practice Study in Greece,” ISRN Pediatrics 2012: 685302.)  This article has been republished with permission from The Family in America, a publication of The Howard Center. The Howard Center is a MercatorNet partner site.