Barrier gestures, also useful for reducing the consumption of antibiotics

This is one of the paradoxes of the coronavirus epidemic.

Thanks to it, the French fall less sick because they massively use barrier gestures, which are as much a brake on the spread of other diseases than Covid-19.

And that, according to Dr Jimmy Mohamed, health consultant for Europe 1, is excellent news in the fight against antibiotic resistance, a phenomenon which leads to less efficiency of antibiotics, too often prescribed by doctors and consumed by doctors. patients.

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"First of all, we must remember that antibiotics have saved millions of lives through infections that can now be treated, which were incurable at the time, such as pneumonia, tuberculosis or sepsis. These antibiotics were discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, but it was not until the 1940s before the industrialization of antibiotics. All this to make it clear that it is quite recent, whereas on a human scale, the bacteria have been there for millions of years.

Fewer viral infections, fewer prescriptions for antibiotics

As infections are treated with antibiotics, the bacteria you are trying to destroy will become increasingly resistant.

Because when you put penicillin, for example, you will kill 99.9% of bacteria.

So there will always remain a small fragment and this small fragment will become resistant.

It will create mechanisms to adapt and resist these antibiotics.

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However, what happens in real life is that these antibiotics are prescribed in town medicine, when you go to see your general practitioner for nasopharyngitis, bronchitis, gastro or even the flu.

However, with barrier gestures, all these viral infections, we no longer see them.

There is no more flu, there is no more bronchitis, there is no longer a classic infection apart from Covid.

And so, with these barrier gestures, the fact of washing your hands, being at a distance, putting on a mask, that will mean that we will have fewer viral infections and therefore fewer prescriptions for antibiotics.

Antibiotics are useless against the coronavirus

We must remember that Covid is a viral infection and that on a virus, an antibiotic does not work.

So what we have observed is that the patients who arrived in the emergency room for somewhat severe Covid infections were all put by their doctor on antibiotics, in particular Azithromycin.

This antibiotic had been proposed by Professor Raoult in his protocol and therefore many have prescribed Azithromycin wrongly.

So, we might create resistance by doing that.

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I can understand the patients.

When you have this infection, for wanting to have treatment, you can't be blamed.

And we can also understand the doctors for wanting to offer treatment, because we do not have a benchmark treatment for Covid.

But it's absolutely useless.

Same thing when you have bronchitis.

It is not because it falls on the bronchi that it is necessary to prescribe antibiotics.

In general, what you must remember is that a respiratory viral infection avoided, it is an antibiotic that is preserved. "