Antibiotic resistance

Who does it affect?

• Infection is one of the most common reasons children visit a doctor.
• Many receive antibiotics for viral infections despite antibiotics being ineffective for viruses.
• Australian infants use a great deal: half receive antibiotics by age one and over 80 per cent by two.
• Early-life antibiotic overuse is linked with poorer health later, including obesity and asthma.
• Overuse drives the development of antibiotic resistance, endangering the ability to treat common infections and do life-saving surgery and transplants. The World Health Organization has declared antibiotic resistance as one of the top 10 global public health threats facing humanity.

Our antibiotic resistance research

Murdoch Children's Research Institute is researching the best ways to use antibiotics. Our aim is that every child can receive precision antibiotic therapy to minimise antibiotic resistance.

We are determining the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in Australian children. We aim to track how resistance spreads through the community, identify hotspots and develop interventions to tackle the problem.

Hospital may not always be the ideal place to give antibiotics, so we are researching alternatives to deliver better outcomes such as treating children with acute infection at home, shortening antibiotic courses and switching to oral.

We are researching better ways to use antibiotics to fight infections in childhood cancer and other vulnerable populations.

Giving the right dose of antibiotics to every child is important and we are developing new approaches to monitor medication levels in the body.

We are using health data to understand the long-term outcomes of the timing of antibiotic use, including during pregnancy and early childhood.

Our team is researching how antibiotics and other factors affect the function of the immune system and the gastrointestinal microbiome – the helpful and harmful bacteria living in the gut that are crucial for health.

We are researching better ways to manage infections in disadvantaged populations to reduce the need for antibiotics.

Our vision

Our vision is for every child to receive the best care through precision antibiotic treatment. We aim to optimise antibiotic use to reduce resistance and improve child health.

Where to next?

The next steps will be to collate all the knowledge we are gaining about how, where and in which children, antibiotic use is linked to resistance and other poor health outcomes. Using these large learnings, we will develop and implement interventions to prevent or reverse the negative impacts of antibiotics, preserving this medical miracle for future generations of children.