Nursing home ills in Ontario tied to heavy antibiotic use
Antibiotics are likely being overused in some nursing homes in Ontario – and that misuse is putting all residents of these facilities at risk, a study suggests.
With most drugs, inappropriate use only threatens the health of the person who takes the medication. But with misuse of antibiotics, the problems that arise – drug-resistant bacteria, C. difficile infections – are not restricted to the people who have been taking the drugs.
“[Nursing] homes with higher use put patients at higher risk,” said Dr. Nick Daneman, first author of the study. “Unlike other medication classes, which can harm the individual recipient of that medication, antibiotics have the capacity to do harm even beyond the individual that gets the medication.”
Daneman is an adjunct scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and an internal medicine physician at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. The study appeared in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, a publication of the American Medical Association.
Full story by Helen Branswell available in The Globe and Mail