Essentially, antibiotics are very important drugs designed to treat specific illnesses such as pneumonia and meningitis, said Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Pat Troop at the launch of the campaign last month. But some antibiotics are becoming less effective at fighting those infections and if we continue to use them inappropriately, more bacteria will become resistant to them.
Although most people realise that antibiotics do not work for colds, the fact that they do not work for the majority of coughs and sore throats is less well known, he said.
Mothers of young children are among the most likely to press GPs for antibiotics. But after the last education campaign in the autumn of 1999, out of a sample of 1,600, only 27 per cent expected antibiotics for a child with a bad cough, compared with 40 per cent beforehand.
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