If you’re not feeling well but aren’t sure if it’s just a lingering cold or something that might require antibiotics, experts say there are some signs to watch for.
With several respiratory infections circulating in the Chicago area, and health officials seeing a number of viruses in hospital rooms, doctors said knowing when an illness can be treated with antibiotics isn’t always a straight forward answer.
“I think it can be a bit tricky sometimes for parents to be able to distinguish between a bacterial and a virus on their own … I always recommend to my patients, if you have any concern, or if you’re questioning your child’s symptoms or their well-being, then you should reach out to me. You should come in so that I can actually sit down with you and we can go over specifically the details of the illness – when your child first got sick and wasn’t feeling well, what the symptoms are – and then I’m able to do a full, complete, and thorough physical examination,” Dr. Allison Foster with Comer Children’s Hospital told NBC Chicago. “And during that physical examination, that’s really what’s going to allow me to distinguish between a bacterial infection and, more commonly, a viral infection.”
The only problem is, antibiotics work on bacterial infections.
“Quite simply, if you don’t have a bacterial infection, an antibiotic is not going to work,” Foster said.
And taking antibiotics unnecessarily isn’t without consequence.
“One of the dangers of taking an antibiotic when you don’t have a bacterial infection, aside from the fact that antibiotics will not work on viruses – they are antibacterial medications so if you don’t have a bacterial infection, that antibiotic that you’re prescribed is not going to do anything for you – but additionally, we will see that sometimes if you’re taking antibiotics, you’re at risk of developing things like rashes, allergic reactions, diarrhea, vomiting, gastrointestinal symptoms. So, you know, it’s not necessarily without consequence if you’re taking an antibiotic, especially if you don’t need it. Now when we think about a larger population scale, the dangers to prescribing antibiotics unnecessarily and to taking them when you don’t need it is that it can increase the resistance patterns that we see out in the larger community when we think about bacteria and this is how we start to get into trouble with more resistant strains of bacteria That can overall make it harder for us as a community to treat.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a number of respiratory viruses are showing “unusual trends” for this time of year.
In a recent report, the agency said four illnesses in particular are “have recently gotten attention in the news or are showing signs of increased activity.”
In emergency rooms, cases of acute upper respiratory infections, sore throats, pneumonia and bronchitis are being reported, as of data through Halloween.
In some cases, the viruses are climbing at surprising rates.
The latest surge has even led a suburban Chicago hospital to limit support people waiting in its emergency room as respiratory virus cases climb.
The main viruses circulating right now include Group A strep, rhinovirus, enterovirus, respiratory adenovirus, mycoplasma pneumoniae and pertussis, also known as whooping cough.
So when should you seek out an antibiotic?
“If a kid has a cold and they’ve got fever and it’s lasting longer than they would like, especially for getting to day 10 or more of total illness with symptoms that are not improving, they should go in and be seen because that could indicate that they might need a little bit more careful evaluation and possibly an antibiotic,” Foster said.
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