Antibiotics

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has ordered Tyson Foods Inc. to stop using a packaging label claiming that its chickens are raised without antibiotics that affect drug resistance in humans, saying the Arkansas company medicates its poultry with gentamicin, which is used to treat bacterial infections in people. The Food Safety and Inspection Service division within the USDA found that Tyson routinely uses gentamicin to "prevent illness and death in chicks," Richard Raymond, the under secretary for food safety, said in a statement yesterday.

COLLEGE PARK -- While police today attempted to determine the exact cause of death of a 21-year-old senior found in her sorority house bedroom yesterday, University of Maryland and county health officials today were distributing antibiotics to prevent a potential outbreak of spinal meningitis.The body of Jennifer Lynn Jones, 21, of Merritt Island, Fla., was discovered about 6 p.m. in her room at the Delta Delta Delta house in the 4600 block of College Ave., just east of the campus, said Prince George's County Police Capt.

Many premature births and other costly complications of childbirth might be avoided if all pregnant women were treated with antibiotics for chlamydia, the nation's most common sexually transmitted disease, according to a computerized cost analysis by a team of University of Maryland scientists.Treating all women as if they were infected could reduce the average cost of childbirth and its complications by $2,700, a savings 10 times greater than if doctors treated only those women who tested positive, the study found.

SICK CHICKS or sick people? The livestock industry's massive use of antibiotics has apparently led to strains of bacteria that are resistant to those wonder drugs. And that puts humans increasingly at risk from food-borne infection. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration a month ago finally took action by banning two antibiotics widely used by poultry growers since 1995. The same family of drugs (fluoroquinolones) used to combat food poisoning in humans has shown a dramatic loss of effectiveness in that short period.

A few years ago, parents who arrived at Dr. Steven E. Caplan's office with a cranky toddler tugging at his ear were likely to go home with an antibiotic. These days, if an ear exam doesn't show clear signs of infection, the Baltimore pediatrician sometimes asks parents to wait a day or two to see if the symptoms persist.Dr. Caplan is one of a growing number of doctors who are trying to reduce the use of antibiotics amid fear that infectious diseases are growing resistant to them. A report issued last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta warned that infectious diseases are on a global rebound.

The widespread use of antibiotics on farm animals may be shortening the length of time the drugs are useful in treating human disease, according to researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. In a report being published today in a national scientific journal, the researchers said it is difficult to say how large a role farms are playing in the growing crisis of antibiotic resistance in the treatment of infections. But David L. Smith, an assistant professor of epidemiology, said there is growing evidence that the heavy use of antibiotics on chickens, pigs and cattle is shortening the "honeymoon period" before drugs lose their effectiveness in people.

The use of prescription antibiotics for conditions such as respiratory infections and rosacea has been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer in women, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, and a nonprofit health plan found that women who took common antibiotics were up to twice as likely to develop breast cancer as women who had taken none. The study, to be published in tomorrow's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, does not conclude that antibiotics cause breast cancer.

The widespread use of standard antibiotics to treat sinus infections does not help cure patients and may harm them by increasing their resistance to the drugs, according to a new study published today. The researchers found that the percentage of patients who got well in 10 days was about the same whether they took an antibiotic or a placebo. "With a little bit of patience, the body will usually heal itself," said Dr. Ian Williamson, a family medicine researcher at the University of Southampton in England and lead author of the paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Former Gov. William Donald Schaefer remained hospitalized Saturday with "a little bit" of pneumonia but is responding to antibiotics, his friend and former aide Lainy LeBow-Sachs said. The 89-year-old Schaefer had some trouble breathing about 9 p.m. Thursday and was taken from the Charlestown retirement community in Catonsville to St. Agnes Hospital, LeBow-Sachs said. Describing the health of the former governor, comptroller and Baltimore mayor, LeBow-Sachs said it's "on and off. " "He's certainly not the governor you know.