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Rapid Flu Tests May Help Avoid Using Antibiotics

(iVillage Total Health) - Rapid flu tests—which can deliver results in 30 minutes—may help hospitals avoid giving patients antibiotics unnecessarily and help slow the rise of a worldwide problem with bacterial resistance to medications.

That is the conclusion of a new study to be published in the February 26 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. Editors released the study early because of its potential impact on public health during the ongoing cold and flu season.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flu is highly contagious and infects up to 20 percent of the population in some years. Diagnosis of flu is often difficult. It can be mistaken for a number of other respiratory infections and illnesses, including bacterial ear infections, colds and allergies.

At issue is the fact that traditional methods for diagnosing influenza involve taking samples of mucus from a patient's throat or nose and sending it to a laboratory. This viral culture analysis may take several days. But many hospitals and physicians often do not wait for the results before prescribing antibiotics. Since the flu is caused by a virus rather than bacteria and antibiotics are antibacterial agents, these medications are needlessly administered to flu patients.

Overuse of antibiotics has been linked to growing antibiotic resistance worldwide. Public health officials are concerned that many of the drugs used to fight infection are becoming less effective and have urged healthcare providers to limit antibiotics as much as possible.

Researchers at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and Rochester General Hospital concluded that rapid flu tests can help limit antibiotic use in hospitals. They studied 166 patients. All were hospitalized with documented cases of influenza during the winters of 1999 to 2003. Only 86 of the patients tested positive for the flu on rapid diagnostic tests; the remaining 80 either tested negative or were not tested.

Those who tested positive for the flu were more likely to forego antibiotics than those who tested negative for the virus. Antiviral drug use was more common among the group that tested positive for flu than those who tested negative. "Patients who continued to receive antibiotics were more often older, were smokers with higher rates of underlying chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and had abnormal lung examination results," the authors wrote.

The rapid flu tests available today can produce results within 30 minutes. However, the CDC cautions that the rapid test results may indicate flu virus when it does not actually exist or show no virus is present when there actually is. The CDC recommends physicians consider sending viral cultures to a lab for testing when there may be uncertainty about results.

The study's authors noted that rapid testing may also help reduce the number of hospital-acquired flu infections—another problem facing many hospitals.

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