Antibiotic resistance falls in Finland.

A nationwide effort to limit erythromycin 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.

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.

Led by a team at the National Public Health Institute in Turku, the researchers documented the decline in resistance after analyzing 39,247 streptococcus 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 in Boston. It says a lot for surveillance in the war on resistant bacteria, he adds.