GENEVA: According to UK's recently released data, due to COVID-19 restrictions, the dental antibiotic prescription's rate increased by over a fifth in 2020.
The data was released ahead of World Health Organization's (WHO) World Antimicrobial Awareness (AMR) Week. The increase mainly occurred when dental practices were shut from March to June 2020, i.e., during COVID's first wave has been slow to decline since.
Wendy Thompson, a member of the FDI World Dental Federation's AMR Working Group, said the use of antibiotics to counter the lack of access to urgent dental care was a risk to patient safety and should be avoided. He further added, there was a need to start treating patients with acute dental pain or infection and not medicating them.
Prescribing antibiotics when not necessary stimulates the development and spread of infections that are resistant to antibiotics, said Thompson.
According to WHO, in the next 30 years, more people would die from resistant infections than cancer unless action was taken or else antimicrobial resistance would be the world's biggest killer by 2050.
Professor Ihsane Ben Yahya, President FDI, said,
"We need to make a clear and public commitment to tackling antibiotic resistance and communicate to the general public what appropriate antibiotic use in dentistry is all about and how it impacts them"
