By Tracy Bowden
A specialist has warned that a three-year-old boy who developed an ear infection could have died because of an overuse of antibiotics and the resulting increase in drug-resistant bacteria.
In September, three-year-old Levi Walsh was admitted to hospital when the common childhood infection did not clear up after a course of antibiotics.
After an operation and more antibiotics, the infection was still raging and it had begun to spread.
His mother, Teagan, said she was terrified.
“It is really, really, scary,” she told 7.30.
“You think you are in hospital, there are medicines, [you can] just keep trying. But they were running short of things to try on him.”
Levi’s father, Nick, said he was concerned about what could have happened.
“What was worrying was they said the infection might spread to his brain or to his spine,” he said.
Dr John Curotta, an ear, nose and throat specialist at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, said Levi’s infection was resistant to antibiotics.
“We were trying first-line, second-line, third-line and up to fourth-line antibiotics,” Dr Curotta said.
“He could have died, but short of that he could have had a brain abscess, he could have stroked out, he could have had a paralysed face, he could be deaf in the ear.”
A strong antibiotic finally cleared the infection.
Australia has high rate of antibiotic use
Doctors say drug-resistant infections will become more common – and not just in hospitals – unless there is a significant reduction in the use of antibiotics.
“An infection like this is a bit like the canary in the coal mine. We wonder what else is going on in the community,” Dr Curotta said.
Australia has one of the highest rates of antibiotic use in the world.
Research published on Monday in the Medical Journal of Australia showed that up to 34 per cent of antibiotics given to hospitalised children might be inappropriate.
Professor Tom Gottlieb, an infectious diseases physician at Sydney’s Concord Hospital, said doctors needed to be more cautious about the use of antibiotics.
“The worry about overuse is … that we may go to a situation where we don’t have sufficient antibiotics for treating important infections while we are wasting them on situations where they are not needed at all,” he said.
The World Health Organisation said the problem was global, and “threatens the achievements of modern medicine”.
There is now a push for antibiotic use to be reduced by 25 per cent over the next five years.