Your child's doctor should do more than just make them say "Ah"
before prescribing antibiotics to treat a sore throat, says a
study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
According to the study, doctors are prescribing antibiotics for
children's sore throats more frequently than is necessary.
Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical
School compared the rate of antibiotic prescriptions for sore
throats to the rate of testing for group A B-hemolytic
streptococci (GABHS) or strep throat, the only common cause of
sore throats which can be treated with antibiotics. These
bacteria are responsible for 15% to 36% of sore throats in
children, the study's authors note. The researchers used data
collected from 1995 to 2003 as part of the US National
Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the National Hospital
Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, which included information from
4,158 sets of medical records on children between the ages of 3
and 17 across the US who had visited a doctor, clinic