I have cold/flu-like symptoms, feel miserable and need to get to work/to the kids/ etc. -can I have an antibiotic prescription, Doc?

New research points to a straightforward way of putting a stop to this all-too-common scenario, and thus over-prescription of antibiotics and their misuse. Tsalik et al, report in the latest issue of Science Translational Medicine clear differences in the host gene expression profile associated with respiratory illness if it is induced by bacterial or viral infection, co-infection or of noninfectious etiology. A cohort of 273 patients and 44 healthy controls was used to develop classifiers, that were then validated using several publicly available datasets.

Although the approach uses peripheral blood, which is easy to access, as starting material, it still needs to be developed into an economic and sufficiently quick platform to be usable in daily clinical practice. Nevertheless, it is a promising new avenue to ultimately prevent antibiotic abuse. Abuse is problematic not only because of resistance, but also because of the dramatic ways it alters host flora.... but that is another topic of discussion.