Antibiotics before infections save lives: study

ICU - and the rest of the hospital. Infections lurk everywhere in hospitals. Good for all patients really.

clipped from news.yahoo.com LONDON (Reuters) – Giving antibiotics to patients in intensive care units as a precaution saves lives, according to a major Dutch study published Wednesday. The findings in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest the benefits of administering antibiotics right away, even before an infection develops, outweigh the risks people will develop resistance to them, the researchers said. "We have seen that using antibiotics clearly results in a reduction in the number of deaths and intensive care units should make use of this knowledge," Anne Marie de Smet, a researcher at University Medical Center Utrecht, said in a statement. Drug-resistant bacteria are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, marked by the rise of superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus, or MRSA. Such infections kill about 19,000 people a year in the United States, while more than 4,000 a year in Britain are infected.