The over-use of antibiotics in Taiwan was once again under the microscope yesterday, as health officials unveiled a campaign to highlight the stark nature of the threat posed by increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
Members of the Department of Health's Center for Disease Control (
"The spread of drug resistance originating from the inappropriate use of antibiotics threatens the lives of everyone in society," said Huang Fu-yuan (
Huang also stressed that Taiwanese should ditch their habit of asking for antibiotics whenever they visit a doctor in the mistaken belief that antibiotics are "wonder drugs" for all diseases.
"Doctors should be further educated about the prudent use of antibiotics, too," he said.
Self-medication with antibiotics, which are often inappropriate or taken in inadequate doses, is also common in Taiwan.
"If we fail to promote education on the correct use of these drugs, we will soon suffer from a lack of treatments for many diseases, just as we did early in the 20th century," warned Huang Kun-yen (黃崑巖), the institute's acting director of clinical research.
Resistance to antibiotics is a natural biological phenomenon that can be amplified or accelerated by human behavior.
Antibiotics force microbes to either adapt or die. In most situations in which antibiotics are inappropriately used, however, bacteria and other microbes adapt rather than die.
According to the WHO, given the rate at which resistance is developing for all currently available drugs, even if the pharmaceutical industry is able to develop replacement drugs as quickly as is currently considered possible, current trends suggest that within the next decade, some diseases will have no effective therapies.
Coping with threats to human health from antibiotic resistance has become a global concern.
Findings from the institute's national surveillance program, which began in 1998, indicate that Taiwan has suffered from an increase in microbes that are resistant to cheap and effective -- or first-line antibiotics.
According to the findings cited at yesterday's press conference, the drug resistance of streptococcus pneumonia has reached 50 percent in Taiwan, more than any other country in the world.
Streptococcus pneumonia is a bacteria, which is the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia, meningitis and ear infection.
Taiwan also has the highest rate in the world of resistance to oxacillin among strains of the bacteria staphylococcus aureus. Staphylococcus aureus can cause minor infections resulting in pimples, boils and other skin conditions, as well as serious conditions such as blood infections or pneumonia, which can be fatal.
In addition, ampicillin has become almost completely ineffective against infectious diseases caused by strains of the escherichia bacteria.
Ampicillin is one of the most useful derivatives of penicillin, highly effective against many bacterial infections.
It is also much harder to treat serratia marcescens infections in Taiwan, as 80 percent of the bacteria, which cause many life-threatening diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis and endocarditis as well as some of the major hospital-acquired infections, are resistant to gentamicin.
Most of these antibiotics are defined by Taiwan's National Health Insurance Plan as first-line drugs.
When infections caused by resistant microbes do not respond to first-line drugs, second- or third-line antibiotics are applied. But they often cost more and are sometimes more toxic.
"Increasing the use of the second- or third-line drugs risks spreading drug resistance to them too," said Chang Shan-chwen (
The campaign will consist of advertisements, public information TV programs, distribution of pamphlets and posters to medical and educational institutions.
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