Antibiotics are a key defence against bacterial pathogens, but now evidence suggests they might beuseful against viral ones, too. Get an update of science stories delivered straight to your inbox. More from:. Paul Biegler. Read science facts, not fiction Make a donation. And other treatments.
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Related Coverage. New coronavirus vs. Medically reviewed by Deborah Weatherspoon, Ph. However, antibiotics do not cure everything, and unnecessary antibiotics can even be harmful.
Some viruses cause symptoms that resemble bacterial infections, and some bacteria can cause symptoms that resemble viral infections. Your healthcare provider can determine what type of illness you have and recommend the proper type of treatment. Each time you take an antibiotic, bacteria are killed. Sometimes, bacteria causing infections are already resistant to prescribed antibiotics.
Bacteria may also become resistant during treatment of an infection. Resistant bacteria do not respond to the antibiotics and continue to cause infection. A common misconception is that a person's body becomes resistant to specific medicines. However, it is the bacteria, not people, that become resistant to the medicines.
Each time you take or give your child an antibiotic unnecessarily or improperly, you increase the chance of developing medicine-resistant bacteria. Therefore, it is critically important to take antibiotics only when necessary. But a major factor in whether these viruses wreck your health may come down to the profile of bacteria that inhabit your intestines, called the gut microbiome , a new study in mice suggests.
The study, published today March 27 in the journal Cell Reports , found that these particular viral infections were more likely to be deadly if the infected mice had been treated in advance with antibiotics. More research is needed to confirm the findings in humans, whose microbiomes differ from those of mice.
The reason is that antibiotics wipe out the gut microbiome, and this weakened microbiome somehow"impairs your immune system ," senior study author Dr. Michael Diamond, a professor of medicine, molecular microbiology, pathology and infectious disease at Washington University School of Medicine in St. But it is important to remember that there may be collateral effects. You might be affecting your immune response to certain viral infections.
Antibiotics kill bacteria , not viruses. Nevertheless, some doctors prescribe antibiotics for viral infections such as colds and the flu as an extra precaution, perhaps to ease the concerns of patients who think they need medicine, or to prevent a subsequent bacterial infection from arising while the body is weak.
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