Last year I did a blog post on my thoughts on the use of antibiotics as a mother on the European Antibiotic Awareness day. You can read it here
This year, there is an ongoing campaign to be an Antibiotic Guardian by Public Health England, and I would like to invite you to become one.
Why you may ask?
Because it affects you and everyone else around you. If we keep abusing the use of antibiotic on treating colds, sore throats and the flu that are caused by viruses, many routine treatments will become increasingly dangerous to treat. Antibiotics are used to clear bacterial infections, and for serious ailments such transplants, chemotherapy and joint replacements.
If you or your child have a cold, sore throat, flu or cough, antibiotics won’t help as they don’t work on viral infection. So instead
- Get plenty rest
- Drink lots of fluid. Green tea, lime, ginger and honey are good natural drinks to give relieve
- Take a pain killer such as calpol or ibruopen
- Wash your hands regularly to reduce the spread of bacteria
- Don’t put pressure on your GP to give you or your child antibiotics
If a high temperature is persistent and won’t go away after using pain killers for days or you’ve got chest pain, bad headaches or coughing up blood then I’ll suggest you visit your GP.
Follow your instincts to know if this is worse than a virus infection.
Watch this short quirky video advocating the best use of Antibotic
If you do need to use antibiotics
- Make sure you complete the dosage at the right time even if it means waking up in the middle of the night to use it
- Don’t keep any antibiotics for a future infection
- Don’t throw any unused antibiotics away (unused medication should always be returned to a pharmacist)
- Don’t take medicine prescribed for someone else or give your medicine to some one else
Won’t you feel better knowing that if your children ever had a critical illness, using antibiotics for it will make it work better and faster than if their systems were already used to having antibotics and it isn’t working now when they really need it.
Why become an Antibiotic Guardian?
To slow resistance we as parents need to cut the use of unnecessary antibiotics so that they are more effective when we or our children actually need them to deal with bacterial infections.
November 18th is European Antibiotic Awareness Day. As part of that the department of Public Health are asking everyone in the UK, the public and the medical community to become Antibiotic Guardians.
Watch this other short video explaining why we all need to be Anitbotic Guardians
You can become an Antibiotic Guardian by joining the pledge!
Choose one simple pledge on the Antibiotic Guardian website about how you’ll make better use of antibiotics and help save this vital medicine from becoming obsolete.
I am now an Antibiotic Guardian and below is my certificate to proof it 🙂
I encourage you to become one as well.
Go to Antibiotic Guardian website to pledge. It won’t take you more than 3 minutes to pledge. That’s a plus for us busy mothers.
