Antibiotic resistance falls in Finland.A nationwide effort to limit erythromycin erythromycin (ĭrĭth'rōmī`sĭn), any of several related antibiotic drugs produced by bacteria of the genus Streptomyces (see antibiotic). prescriptions in Finland in the 1990s has short-circuited bacterial resistance there. Streptococcus pyogenes had grown resistant to erythromycin, an antibiotic commonly prescribed for people who are allergic to penicillin but who have a respiratory or skin infection caused by group A streptococcus group A streptococcus n. A common but virulent streptococcus that kills the tissue it infects and produces toxins that trigger a form of shock that affects the vital organs. . As outpatient prescriptions of erythromycin dried up between 1991 and 1996, the resistance rate among group A streptococcus bacteria isolated from throat swabs, pus, and blood samples fell from 16.5 percent to 8.6 percent, Finnish researchers report in the Aug. 14 New England Journal OF Medicine The New England Journal of Medicine (New Engl J Med or NEJM) is an English-language peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. It is one of the most popular and widely-read peer-reviewed general medical journals in the world. . Led by a team at the National Public Health Institute in Turku, the researchers documented the decline in resistance after analyzing 39,247 streptococcus streptococcus (strĕp'təkŏk`əs), any of a group of gram-positive bacteria, genus Streptococcus, some of which cause disease. samples. "It's a beautiful study," says Stuart Levy, director of the Center for Adaptation Genetics and Drug Resistance at Tufts University School of Medicine The Tufts University School of Medicine is one of the eight schools that comprise Tufts University. Located on the university's health sciences campus in the Chinatown district of Boston, Massachusetts, the medical school has clinical affiliations with thousands of doctors and in Boston. It says a lot for surveillance in the war on resistant bacteria, he adds. |
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