Dubai Medical Insurance officials are warning citizens of the UAE to avoid overusing antibiotics in order to avoid developing pneumococcal diseases like meningitis and community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). This comes after a study of the Emirate found that over the last two decades, rampant antibiotic overuse has caused the bacterium responsible for these diseases, the pneumococcus, to become increasingly resistant to penicillin in antibiotics. Doctors in the UAE have said that pneumococcal diseases are still the largest killers of children worldwide, and can also cause significant health problems for adults, including respiratory and congestive heart failures.
The announcement in the UAE was due in part for the need to educate the population because other risk factors for developing pneumococcal diseases, such as chronic illnesses like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as well as a history of smoking, are common amongst the UAE population.
According to a 2008 World Health Organisation (WHO) report, pneumococcal diseases are responsible for approximately 1.6 million deaths annually, mostly in infants below the age of five and adults over the age of 65 years.
The severity of the disease depends on which part of the body is affected by the bacterium, the disease can present itself as one of several conditions, with the most severe being meningitis, in which the covering of the brain is infected.
UAE Health Insurance partners called upon doctors and health officials to better inform patients on the proper use of the medication. The concern is that patients who need antibiotics are often unaware of how to properly use them, and therefore tended to overuse them. For example, most infections that affect children are viral and therefore cannot be cured by antibiotics. However, many parents believe that the course of a viral infection is reduced with an antibiotic, and therefore request that these medicines be prescribed for their children.