Study shows good and bad news in antibiotic resistance

There’s some good and bad news from a study of antibiotic resistance in Iowa hospitals.The University of Iowa is coordinating the study that began collecting data from 15 hospitals in 1998. U-of-I pathology professor Gary Doern says early results show the rates of hospital-based bacteria resistant infections in Iowa are consistently and substantially lower than the rest of the U-S. Doern says the downside of the study involves bacteria resistance rates for two pathogens that cause respiratory tract infections. Iowa looked worse than the rest of the country in this area.Doern says it appears Iowa hospitals are using antibiotics as prudently to treat respiratory infections as other hospitals in the U-S. Doern says they learned some things in the first three years of the study, such as, the two most important issues in controlling antibiotic resistance are antibiotic use policies, and infection prevention. Doern says the first-of-its-kind study will continue for another three years.