Antibiotics

Though top health officials are urging people not to stockpile antibiotics, worried Americans are continuing to do just that. Their fears that government supplies might not be mobilized for a large-scale attack is shared by some bioterrorism experts. Reports of an anthrax case in New York yesterday, coming after news coverage about three people exposed in Florida, promise to exacerbate what has been a month-long run on pharmacies. Some drugstores said they were being flooded with a wave of prescriptions for the antibiotic Cipro, a drug used for many common ailments such as urinary tract infections but also for anthrax.

Donald Ross worked for years in poultry plants on the Eastern Shore, hanging chickens on hooks, weighing them, packing them and wielding a knife in the "kill room." About four months ago, he nicked the middle finger on his left hand. The tiny cut should have healed quickly, but it ballooned instead into a festering golf ball-size lesion. Months of antibiotic treatments failed to shrink it, and it had to be surgically removed. Ross, 46, and a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researcher suspect his infection was caused by drug-resistant bacteria in chickens at the Temperanceville, Va., plant where he worked.

Antibiotics are being used far more heavily in pigs, cows and chickens than has been revealed by the drug and livestock industries, a public interest group is expected to announce today, giving as evidence its calculations of the use of the drugs on farms. Healthy farm animals are routinely fed antibiotics to promote growth and prevent infections. The issue is of concern because that practice can breed strains of drug-resistant bacteria, which can infect people who eat meat from the animals or come in contact with food or water contaminated by the animals' droppings.

A sea change is under way in how American medicine deals with one of the most familiar banes of childhood, ear infections. Doctors now are not so quick to call a red eardrum an ear infection or pull out the prescription pad. At the heart of the new strategy is an approach called "watchful waiting" -- delaying the start of an antibiotic to see if the child gets better without it. Some parents are being given a prescription -- a "Safety-Net Antibiotic Prescription"...

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.

Last fall's anthrax attacks would have claimed at least twice as many victims had postal and media workers not been placed quickly on antibiotics, a Johns Hopkins University study concludes. Ron Brookmeyer, a biostatistician at the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Natalie Blades, a graduate student, applied statistical analysis to three clusters of cases of the most serious form of the disease, inhalation anthrax: postal workers in New Jersey and Washington and employees of a tabloid publishing company in Florida.

Towson University's health center administered antibiotics to nearly 250 students yesterday as preventive medicine against bacterial meningitis, after a freshman was diagnosed with the disease on Thursday.The student, a member of the Kappa Delta sorority who lives on the third floor of Scarborough Hall dormitory, was hospitalized after she suffered headaches, stiffness and a sore throat, said school officials, who declined to identify the student or release her condition.Dr. Jane L. Halpern, director of the student health center, said none of the students who came to the university's Dowell Health Center showed symptoms of the disease.

A New Windsor-based relief organization is working to prevent a potential epidemic of tuberculosis in Iraq. Interchurch Medical Assistance, a nonprofit association of 12 Protestant relief agencies, made $100,000 available to buy antibiotics to fight tuberculosis, a contagious disease that claims 3 million lives a year worldwide. The medicine, which arrived in Iraq late last month, will allow about 6,000 tuberculosis patients to continue their treatment, until Aide Medicale Internationale, a relief organization that has worked in Iraq since 1981, can take over the distribution program, IMA officials said.

BOCA RATON, Fla. - Investigators continued to comb the headquarters of the nation's largest supermarket tabloids yesterday for clues to two anthrax cases while hundreds of people lined up to be tested for the disease and take antibiotics - just in case. Authorities said it would be two or three days before they have results of tests conducted on more than 800 employees who worked in or visited the building, home of American Media Inc., publisher of The National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids.

Zinc supplements, a popular if controversial weapon against colds in the United States, are effective in treating cases of severe pneumonia, researchers reported yesterday. In a study in Bangladesh, zinc added to a standard antibiotic helped hospitalized children recover faster. Perhaps more significantly, it prevented outright treatment failures - suggesting that doctors might not have to switch antibiotics as often to get results. By reducing a child's exposure to antibiotics, doctors hope they will be able to stem the worrisome growth of antibiotic-resistant diseases, which are fast becoming a public health scourge worldwide.