• Question: If we didn't use antibiotics to ease hay fever and asthma when it was first dicovered would it still be a rare allergy today ?

    Asked by kirsty10 to MarkF, Mark, Michael, Panos, Sarah on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Panos Soultanas

      Panos Soultanas answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Kirsty,

      there is no need to use antibiotics for hay fever and for allergies. they do not help at all in such cases. in fact some people develop allergies against some antibiotics. Controlled use of antibiotics helps to slow down the emergence of resistance in microbes.

    • Photo: Sarah Burl

      Sarah Burl answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      antibiotics are not used to treat allergies. Allergies are an overactive immune reaction to something. The reaction produces a substance called histamine which gives you the symptoms of allergy. The treatment for allergy is anti-histamines to get rid of the histamine and relieve symptoms.

    • Photo: Mark Fogg

      Mark Fogg answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Hay fever and asthma are not treated by antibiotics, they are allergies. Allergies are not treated by antibiotics. However, allergies could be caused by people being too clean when they are little. When you’re growing up, your immune system grows up too. It needs to ‘see’ bugs, like colds and harmless bacteria, to ‘grow’ properly. If you are too clean it doesn’t see these things and doesn’t learn to work properly. When it doesn’t work properly, your immune system treats harmless things like pollen as if they were nasty, it’s confused. That’s what allergies like Hay fever are. Hay fever is when your immune system is working in confused mode.

    • Photo: Mark Travis

      Mark Travis answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Antibioics fight against bacteria- but hey fever is an allergy against pollen (which means the immune system reacts inappropriately against pollen that enters the body) and asthma is a complex disease that is often associated with allergies. So, we didn;t ever use antibiotics to try and cure hayfever and asthma.

      But, you are right that using antibiotics too much is not a good thing, as bacteria can mutate and become resistant. So, it is important that we use antibiotics responsibley and only when absolutely necessary to stop antibiotic resistant strains becoming apparent.

    • Photo: Michael Loughlin

      Michael Loughlin answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      we don’t use antibiotics to ease hayfever as far as i know nor asthma

Comments