New CDC guidance helps doctors avoid giving antibiotics for colds

(credit: anna gutermuth)

However miserable, common colds and other respiratory afflictions are unlikely to clear up from a round of antibiotics. And it’s about time doctors stop handing out the precious drugs for that purpose, according to a joint guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Physicians (ACP).

In the new set of guidelines, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the ACP and the CDC give doctors a play-by-play for how to dodge requests for antibiotics to treat respiratory infections—the most common reason people go to the doctor—and push alternative, over-the-counter treatments instead.

Unnecessary prescriptions, the two groups argue, can expose swaths of bacteria to antibiotics, providing opportunities for the microbes to develop drug-resistance—a huge public health threat that renders drugs nearly useless against some life-threatening infections. Half of all current antibiotic prescriptions handed out likely fall into the ‘unnecessary’ category, costing more than $3 billion annually, the CDC estimates.

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