Antibiotics in babies may cause asthma!

Antibiotics are the wonder drugs from the 20th century. However their success has also been their downfall.
Antibiotic misuse has lead to increasing drug resistance, and nowadays this has lead to a decrease in their prescription by many physicians. Now there is another reason to ask your pediatrician to think again before giving an antibiotic prescription.

A recent canadian study in Chest Medical journal has suggested that those children treated with even a single course of antibiotics under the age of one are twice as likely to develop asthma in childhood as kids who are not given any antibiotics!

It found that for each extra course of antibiotics during the first year of life a child was 1.16 times more likely to develop asthma. What pediatricians and parents need to remember is that most respiratory infections in this age are viral and do not require antibiotics. It is believed that this effect may be as a result of anitbiotics killing the beneficial bacteria in the intestine, leading to alteration of immunity, which perhaps leads to asthma.