‘The silent pandemic’ — AMR: Vaccines or antimicrobials? The best medicine needs both

Vaccines to prevent illness and antibiotics to treat infections are discoveries that revolutionized medicine for children and adults. They complement each other for prevention of complications due to disease and that could arise from medical treatments such as cesarian sections, transplants and orthopedic surgeries. Jason G. Newland, MD, MEd, is division chief of infectious diseases for Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, talks about why these are crucial to the advance of medicine.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Medical Economics: In a larger sense, can you discuss the importance of the combination of vaccines and antibiotics as a one two punch, so to speak, for preventing and curing illness.

Jason G. Newland, MD, MEd: It's essential. We can't just rely on antibiotics. We have to rely on and probably need to rely more on, our prevention strategies. That includes vaccination, vaccination for both viruses and bacteria. If we vaccinate for viruses, you might not have the complications of super infection with a bacteria. So you eliminate that as a possibility, but you also eliminate the possibility of some of the difficulties in distinguishing between a viral and bacterial infection, like pneumonia, because pneumonia can be caused by viruses and bacteria. An X-ray doesn't tell you exactly, so prevention matters. But we're always going to need antibiotics. And not only do we need antibiotics to treat infections, but the reason why we have cesarean sections for pregnant women, and it can be safe, is because we can prevent infections with an antibiotic. The reason why we can have oncology patients and bone marrow transplants do well is because we can prevent infections with antibiotics. The reason why we can do big orthopedic surgical cases like putting in a rod in a teenager's back because it's curved, and do that safely where their infection rates are next to nothing, is because we have antibiotics to prevent infections. To say antibiotics hasn't revolutionized healthcare alongside vaccines, would be false. These two advancements in the past 100 years have really changed health care, not only for children — tremendously for children, tremendously for children — but also for adults.