A hospital consultant has warned that the real millennium bugs to watch out for are those which cause common infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia as they are becoming resistant to antibiotics.
Dr Philip Murphy, a consultant microbiologist, urged GPs to cut back on the prescribing of antibiotics and to think carefully about whether a patient really needed them this winter. Overuse of drugs was the cause of this growing resistance, he said.
The Tallaght Hospital consultant also urged parents not to use antibiotics prescribed for one child to treat another in the family or neighbourhood without first seeking advice. "This is something Irish people are very lax about," he said.
"Anecdotally, patients are getting antibiotics from non-approved sources, and this, too, has led to resistance," he added.
Addressing GPs at the Education Centre of Tallaght Hospital yesterday on the theme "The real millennium bugs - are you antibiotic Y2K ready?" Dr Murphy said there had been a dramatic emergence of penicillin resistance to streptococcus pneumoniae, the bacterium that causes pneumonia, over the past five years.
"Not only have we seen the recent emergence of penicillin resistance, but one-third of these bugs are also multi-drug-resistant, which is very worrying. If that were to continue we could be presented with a major therapeutic dilemma," he said.
There was also 25 per cent resistance now to ampicillin, the drug used for decades to treat haemophilus influenza, a bacterial infection of the respiratory tract which causes bronchitis. It was very common in winter, especially among smokers.
"Therefore ampicillin is not reliable any more especially in the treatment of a seriously ill patient," Dr Murphy said.
"Because of this increasing resistance, which is quite new, we need to reconsider what our first-line antibiotics should be," he stressed.
An alternative and effective drug, he suggested, was tetracycline, which had been available for years but had not developed the same resistance as it was little used. However, it should not be used to treat children or expectant mothers.
The consultant said it was essential now for doctors to consider whether a patient really needed antibiotics before prescribing. "In previous decades the prescribing of antibiotics was quite routine for a child with fever but nowadays the first question we must ask ourselves is: does the patient really need an antibiotic as a lot of these are viral infections on which antibiotics have no effect?" he said.