Antibiotic overuse: Expert warns of link to childhood obesity

There is growing evidence linking excessive use of antibiotics to childhood obesity and other long-term conditions, a leading international expert has said in Dublin.

Early antibiotic use has a profound effect on the microbiome (organisms in the body), which is relevant to a range of chronic diseases such as obesity and irritable bowel syndrome, according to Princeton University professor Ramanan Laxminarayan.

Antibiotics were used in animals to promote weight gain and it was “possible” they had the same effect when used in children, he said. They were also a known treatment for acute malnutrition “so why wouldn’t they work at the higher end of the scheme?”.

Prof Laxminarayan, a trained epidemiologist, was giving the annual O’Brien Science Lecture on “The Coming Crisis in Antibiotics” in UCD.

Prof Laxminarayan said that, in fact, the crisis in antibiotic resistance had already begun, as some bacterial infections were no longer treatable.

Drug resistance

Over 700,000 people a year die from drug-resistant infections. Of these 200,000 are newborns, a death rate Prof Laxminarayan described as unacceptable.

He called for a change in thinking about the use of antibiotics akin to the level of change seen in recent decades in relation to tobacco. “We think we have a God-given right to treatment with these drugs but that’s not going to happen” in future.

In Sweden, he pointed out, patients who go to their doctors with a fever are told to wait three days before an antibiotic will be prescribed. People in Norway use 40 per cent less antibiotics than Irish people and “aren’t any less healthy”.

The problem is not confined to the developing world, he said, as nearly every elderly person in developed countries would eventually require the kind of surgical intervention that might expose them to drug-resistant bugs.

“We’re dismantling the foundations of modern medicine,” he warned.

“Today, more people are dying because of a lack of access to antibiotics than die from drug resistance, but that will soon change.”