Photo Credit: mRio/FlickrThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants hospitals to issue fewer prescriptions for antibiotics. Why? Because the drugs that are supposed to make people feel better are being abused, actually causing illness, and hastening the arrival of infections for which medicine has no cure.

That’s not to say the CDC wants to cut the drugs from treatment entirely. A bacterial infection still requires antibiotics. Rather, the CDC wants to stifle the approximately 30 percent to 50 percent of antibiotic treatments that the organization deems unnecessary or inappropriate. The CDC also want doctors to make smarter dosing decisions when antibiotic use is appropiate.

Antibiotics can cause CDI (C. difficile infection), a diarrhea “that often recurs and can progress to sepsis and death,” as the CDC report released Tuesday reads. CDI occurs when antibiotics throw off the natural balance of healthy bacteria in the digestive tract.

In the study, the CDC predicted that decreasing antibiotic use by 30 percent would lead to a 26 percent decrease in CDI. By the CDC’s estimate, that would improve the outcomes of 65,000 people. Furthermore, the center found that one in three prescriptions for urinary tract infections contained a potential error (“given without proper testing or evaluation, or given for too long”), and some hospitals prescribe antibiotics at rates three times as high as others.

But those problems seem small when you consider the looming threat of the overuse of antibiotics—the rise in diseases that do not respond to the drugs at all.

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Photo Credit: OLIVIER DOULIERY — Abaca Press/MCTThe nation’s top military commander painted a dark picture Tuesday of future U.S. defense capabilities clouded by shrinking Pentagon budgets and adversaries’ technological advances that he said would erode American battlefield superiority.

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided his sobering views as part of the Quadrennial Defense Review, a congressionally mandated evaluation of U.S. military strength issued every four years.

Dempsey predicted that it would become increasingly difficult to balance the competing demands of protecting allies abroad, securing Americans at home and deterring future wars.

“The smaller and less capable military outlined in the QDR makes meeting these obligations more difficult,” he said. “Most of our platforms and equipment will be older, and our advantages in some domains will have eroded. Our loss of depth across the force could reduce our ability to intimidate opponents from escalating conflicts.”

Dempsey added: “Moreover, many of our most capable allies will lose key capabilities. The situation will be exacerbated given our current readiness concerns, which will worsen over the next three or four years.”

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