Will doctors stop using Bactrim to treat urinary tract infections?
Many will. With one in five UTIs resistant to Bactrim, it will be harder for doctors to use it as a frontline drug. If you fail to get rid of the infection the first go-round, the patient has a greater chance of getting kidney infection, flank pain, high fever, or other complications. The back-up drugs are the fluoroquinolones like Ciprofloxacin, which we ve all heard of because it s used to treat anthrax. When a patient comes in with a UTI, I would now use Cipro or another fluoroquinolone to treat it. Q: Even though the Bactrim study only looked at three states? A: Yes. The researchers found that a large fraction of the resistant infections were caused by the same strain of E. coli bacteria, which had reached across three states. They only looked at three, but they found it in all of them, which suggests that if they had looked at more states, they would have found it there as well. Q: What s wrong with using Cipro? A: It s more expensive, it has more side effects, and it kills more b
