"If you talk to people about antibiotic resistance, they think it's somebody else's problem," Hay said.

In general, he and his fellow researchers recommend that if a patient has received one or more courses of antibiotics in the past year, a different antibiotic should be given for certain future infections. And Hay thinks antibiotics often shouldn't be prescribed for many everyday respiratory tract infections, sore throats and even simple chest infections, where evidence suggests they rarely help people feel better or get well faster.

"When [antibiotics] were first developed, they were such miraculous drugs, we still hanker after the good old days," he said. "We've sort of diluted their effectiveness by using them for less and less serious infections."

Hay said he and his colleagues are now conducting a pilot study to see how critical these effects are: if hospital admissions with infections are more likely to be resistant if the patient had a large number of antibiotic courses beforehand from primary care.

"We're looking at not just the minor end of the spectrum of coughs and colds at an ambulatory care center," Hay said, "but rather something that's a little bit more serious for a patient that means they're ill enough to require treatment."

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