More ADHD drugs, fewer antibiotics for US kids: study

"A pediatrician performs a check-up on a child at the University of Miami Pediatric clinic in 2007 in Miami, Florida. More drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and fewer antibiotics are being prescribed to US children and teenagers compared to a decade ago. (AFP Photo/Joe Raedle)" title

View the Original article

Study Says Priobiotics Ward Off Diarrhea After Antibiotics

This story comes from the Yahoo! Contributor Network, where individuals publish their unique perspectives on some of the world’s most popular websites.Do you have a story to tell? Become a Yahoo! contributor

FIRST PERSON

View the Original article

Does giving antibiotics to animals hurt humans?

"background-image:url('http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/FPBprNs5rAcwGpCYrJmfow--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Y2g9MTc1OTtjcj0xO2N3PTI2Mzg7ZHg9MDtkeT0wO2ZpPXVsY3JvcDtoPTEyNztxPTg1O3c9MTkw/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/ap_webfeeds/c291ff612d7a5f0b0d0f6a70670083b2.jpg');" width

View the Original article

FDA Seeks to Limit Antibiotics in Animal Feed

HealthDay – 57 mins ago WEDNESDAY, April 11 (HealthDay News) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration unveiled Wednesday a plan to reduce the use of antibiotics in animal feed.

The practice of mixing antibiotics in animal feed to make livestock, pigs and chickens gain weight and become more resistant to disease has been criticized in many quarters. Health experts contend that this overuse of antibiotics has led to an increase of germs that are growing increasingly resistant to antibiotics, threatening human health.

The FDA said it was issuing three documents to help veterinarians, farmers and animal producers use medically important antibiotics "judiciously" by limiting their use only to combat diseases and other health problems. Under this "voluntary" initiative, certain antibiotics would not be used for so-called "production" purposes, which include enhancing growth or improving the effectiveness of animal feed, the agency said in a news release.

These antibiotics would still be available to prevent, control or treat illnesses in food-producing animals under the supervision of a veterinarian, the agency said.

"It is critical that we take action to protect public health," FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg, said in the news release. "The new strategy will ensure farmers and veterinarians can care for animals while ensuring the medicines people need remain safe and effective. We are also reaching out to animal producers who operate on a smaller scale or in remote locations to help ensure the drugs they need to protect the health of their animals are still available."

The FDA said it was publishing three documents Wednesday in the Federal Register detailing its efforts to limit antibiotic use in animal feed:

A final guidance for industry, The Judicious Use of Medically Important Antimicrobial Drugs in Food-Producing Animals, that recommends phasing out the agricultural production use of medically important drugs and phasing in veterinary oversight of therapeutic uses of these drugs. A draft guidance, open for public comment, which will assist drug companies in voluntarily removing production uses of antibiotics from their FDA-approved product labels; adding, where appropriate, scientifically supported disease prevention, control, and treatment uses; and changing the marketing status to include veterinary oversight.A draft proposed Veterinary Feed Directive regulation, open for public comment, that outlines ways that veterinarians can authorize the use of certain animal drugs in feed, which is important to make the needed veterinary oversight feasible and efficient.

Dr. John Clifford, chief veterinary medical officer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said in the news release: "USDA worked with the FDA to ensure that the voices of livestock producers across the country were taken into account, and we will continue to collaborate with the FDA, the American Veterinary Medical Association and livestock groups to ensure that the appropriate services are available to help make this transition."

Public health advocates are skeptical about asking drug makers to voluntarily restrict use of their products, the Associated Press reported.

"This is not an issue where trust should be the measure. This is an issue where the measure is whether or not the FDA has fulfilled its authority of protecting public health," Richard Wood, Chair of the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition, said in a statement, the AP reported.

View the Original article

FDA wants limits on antibiotics given to animals

The Food and Drug Administration called on drug companies Wednesday to help limit the use of antibiotics given to farm animals, a decades-old practice that scientists say has contributed to a surge in dangerous, drug-resistant bacteria.

Antibiotics are mixed with animal feed to help livestock, pigs and chickens put on weight and stay healthy in crowded barns. Scientists have warned that this routine use leads to the growth of antibiotic-resistant germs that can be passed to humans.

The FDA has struggled for decades with how to tackle the problem because the powerful agriculture industry says the drugs are a key part of modern meat production.

Under the new FDA guidelines, the agency recommends antibiotics be used "judiciously," or only when necessary to keep animals healthy. The agency also wants to require a veterinarian to prescribe the drugs. They can currently be purchased over-the-counter by farmers.

"Now you have a veterinarian who will be consulting and providing advice to these producers, and we feel that is an important element to assure that they are in fact using these drugs appropriately," said William Flynn, a deputy director in FDA's veterinary medicine center.

The draft recommendations by the FDA are not binding, and the agency is asking for drug manufacturers' cooperation to put the limits in place. Drug companies would need to adjust the labeling of their antibiotics to remove so-called production uses of the drugs. Production uses include increased weight gain and accelerated growth, which helps farmers save money by reducing feed costs. The FDA hopes drugmakers will phase out language recommending those uses within three years.

But the voluntary approach was met with skepticism by some public health advocates, who said they do not trust the drug industry to voluntarily restrict its own products.

"This is not an issue where trust should be the measure. This is an issue where the measure is whether or not the FDA has fulfilled its authority of protecting public health," said Richard Wood, Chair of the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition, in a statement.

FDA officials said that a formal ban would have required individual hearings for each drug, which could take decades.

"The process we would have to go through is a formal hearing process, product-by-product that is extremely cumbersome," said Mike Taylor, FDA Commissioner for foods. "There's no point in going through those legalistic proceedings when companies are willing to make this shift voluntarily."

Taylor said the FDA has consulted closely with animal drugmakers, and expects them to support the measures.

The debate over antibiotics has long pitted the benefits for producing safe, low-cost meat against the risk of contributing to dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can infect humans. In its guidelines Wednesday, the FDA said the benefits for meat production do not warrant overuse of the drugs.

"FDA believes that using medically important antimicrobial drugs to increase production in food-producing animals is not a judicious use," the agency states.

The rollout from FDA comes at an unusual time in the agency's attempts to curb antibiotic use in animals. Last month a federal court judge ordered the agency to take action on its own 35-year-old rule that would have banned non-medical use of two popular antibiotics, penicillin and tetracycline, in farm animals.

The FDA issued the rule in 1977 but never enforced it, following vigorous pushback from members of Congress and lobbyists for farmers and drugmakers. Four public safety groups sued the agency to act on the regulation, winning the case handed down in the U.S. District Court of Southern New York on March 22. The agency was given 60 days to appeal the decision.

The waning effectiveness of antibiotics has been a global health concern for several decades, attracting the attention of the World Health Organization, the Institute of Medicine and other health groups. As bacteria have grown more resistant, new and more deadly forms of malaria, staph and other infections that were once easily treatable have emerged across the globe.

Experts say overuse of antibiotics in both animals and humans has contributed to the problem. Both medical societies and government agencies have launched educational programs designed to educate physicians on appropriate prescribing of antibiotics.

View the Original article

Study Finds Antibiotics Best for Appendicitis

HealthDay – 1 hr 1 min ago THURSDAY, April 5 (HealthDay News) -- For people suffering from uncomplicated appendicitis, a course of antibiotics may be just as good as having the appendix removed, British researchers report.

The researchers reviewed studies involving hundreds of patients to determine that treatment with antibiotics could be a safe alternative to surgery, which has been the so-called "gold standard" of care for an inflamed appendix since 1889.

"Starting antibiotics when the diagnosis of uncomplicated acute appendicitis is made, with reassessment of the patient, will prevent the need for most appendectomies, reducing patient morbidity," said lead researcher Dr. Dileep Lobo, professor of gastrointestinal surgery at the University of Nottingham and Queen's Medical Centre.

Antibiotics also can shorten a patient's hospital stay, he added.

Since better diagnostic tools are now available to diagnose appendicitis, it is safe to adopt a careful "wait, watch and treat" policy for those who have uncomplicated appendicitis or when the diagnosis is uncertain, Lobo said.

"In these patients, correct diagnosis rather than an early appendectomy is the key," he said. But, he added, "for patients with clear signs of perforation or peritonitis (an inflammation of the abdominal wall), early appendectomy still remains the gold standard."

For the report, which is published in the April 5 online edition of BMJ, Lobo's team did a meta-analysis of four studies in which at total of 900 patients with appendicitis were randomly assigned to surgery or antibiotics.

Among patients treated with antibiotics, 63 percent did not need any further treatment after a year. In addition, antibiotic use resulted in 31 percent fewer complications than surgery, the researchers found.

Among the more than 400 patients treated with antibiotics, 68 had recurrent symptoms. Of those, 13 had serious appendicitis, four had a normal appendix and three were successfully treated with more antibiotics, the researchers noted.

The researchers also found no real differences in the length of hospital stays or the risk of complicated appendicitis between people treated with antibiotics and those who underwent surgery.

Dr. Rodney Mason, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles, reported similar findings in his own study in the February issue of the journal Surgical Infections. "Antibiotic therapy offers a risk of complications that is significantly less than that of appendectomy," he said.

But patients must be willing to accept the idea that they may have to return for surgery if symptoms recur, he said.

"Patients must be willing to accept an initial failure and subsequent recurrence rate of about 40 percent in exchange for the possibility of foregoing surgery and its associated risks," Mason said. "Having said that, 60 percent of patients will get by without surgery."

"Conservative treatment with antibiotics seems to do better than appendectomy," said Dr. Olaf Bakker, from the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands and the author of an accompanying journal editorial.

He noted in his editorial, however, that appendectomy does not have a lot of complications, while the researchers found that antibiotic treatment resulted in a 20 percent chance of recurrence within a year.

"Of these recurrences, 20 percent of patients presented with a perforated

View the Original article