As an Australian originally, this article is pretty hard to take seriously. I have a great many problems with Australia's medical system, especially the GPs-then-hospitals-with-nothing-in-between idea, but overprescribing drugs has not been one of them. If anything it's been the opposite, it's ridiculously hard to get anything out of a doctor there, especially antibiotics and double especially anything that could conceivably be abused in some way.
The experience overseas is so much more loose that I wonder what the author is on, no pun intended. In Indonesia the health care system was so broken that I actually became kind of a low level expert in antibiotics myself, and would regularly self-diagnose and "prescribe" myself whatever, which I could just walk into any pharmacy, demand, and get. In Thailand it's a little stricter but not much.
So with two much larger countries right nearby with much laxer rules it's hard for me to take seriously the notion that tiny, isolated Australia's moderately bad GP habits, if that is even true, is having much of an effect on anything.
OK, I have to admit I'm surprised it's that high. As you'd expect, it's heavily biased towards the elderly. It's good that a light is being shone on it.
But the article is written as if Australia is some kind of global prime suspect in driving resistance trends, and I continue to doubt whether that is actually the case.
There's a fact in the article discussing this exact point around relative rates of antimicrobial use by country:
> Australia ranks seventh-highest in the developed world for antimicrobial community prescribing rates. Australia’s hospital antimicrobial use is estimated to be nearly three times that of the European country with the lowest use, the Netherlands.
So we are top 10 but not the single worse offender, at least by this metric.
The experience overseas is so much more loose that I wonder what the author is on, no pun intended. In Indonesia the health care system was so broken that I actually became kind of a low level expert in antibiotics myself, and would regularly self-diagnose and "prescribe" myself whatever, which I could just walk into any pharmacy, demand, and get. In Thailand it's a little stricter but not much.
So with two much larger countries right nearby with much laxer rules it's hard for me to take seriously the notion that tiny, isolated Australia's moderately bad GP habits, if that is even true, is having much of an effect on anything.