Posted: Mar 19, 2013 7:00 AM by By Serena Gordon TUESDAY, March
19 (HealthDay News) -- Black children are less likely than other
children to be given antibiotics and less likely to be given the
most powerful antibiotics to treat acute respiratory tract
infections, new research suggests. Does this represent a
previously unrecognized bias against black children? Probably
not, said the researchers and other experts. Instead, it's more
likely that non-black children are getting more antibiotics than
they should be. "We hypothesize that this discrepancy reflects
over-prescribing, both for all antibiotics and for the relative
proportion of broad-spectrum antibiotics, to non-black patients,
rather than under-prescribing to black patients," wrote the
researchers led by Dr. Jeffrey Gerber, of the Children's
Hospital of Philadelphia, who added that more study of this
pattern should be conducted. Dr. Allison Bartlett, a pediatric
infectious disease specialist at LaRabida Children's Hospital in
Chicago, agreed. "The fact