Giving Antibiotics To Healthy Kids In Poor Countries: Good Idea Or Bad Idea?
Researchers administered doses of azithromycin to 190,238 children in sub-Saharan Africa. The death rate dropped, but fear of antibiotic resistance looms.
Every day, 15,000 children five years old or younger die of preventable conditions diarrhea and pneumonia. In 2016, that number added up to 5.6 million children, most of them in the developing world, according to the World Health Organization.
What if a simple intervention could save tens of thousands of those children? Seems like a no-brainer — unless the method used to save them puts tens of thousands of others at risk in the future.
That's the dilemma presented by Researchers enrolled 190,238 healthy children and, over a period of two years, gave half of them four doses of the antibiotic azithromycin and half of them a placebo. The children lived in three
