European Antibiotics Awareness Day 2011

Today, 18^th November, is European Antibiotics Awareness Day. The day is a European public health initiative, which aims to raise awareness about the threats to public health of antibiotic resistance and to promote the prudent use of antibiotics. In Ireland the campaign, launched today in the RCPI building, is focusing on the topic 'When you have cold or flu, antibiotics just won't do'. The campaign aims to raise awareness of what antibiotics can do; treat infections caused by bacteria (germs), and what they can't; treat infections caused by viruses. The campaign highlights that it is not just ineffective to take antibiotics for viral infections but can be dangerous; causing unpleasant side effects and allowing the development of antibiotic resistance. Further details of the Irish campaign can be found here.

RCPI's archive holds a small collection of papers relating to two important bacteriologist and immunologist of the early twentieth century; Sir Almroth Wright (1861-1947) and one of his students Leonard Colebrook (1883-1967).

Including in the collection are a series of letters written by Almroth Wright to Leonard Colebrook during the First World War, when the former was running a research unit studying the bacteriology of wound infection at the British Army Hospital in Boulogne. Wright's work in Boulogne challenged the traditional dependence of the medical profession on antiseptics in wound treatment, as they could not reach deeply into infected wounds. His views were vehemently attacked by many in the medical profession, but later research vindicated many of Wright's findings and his ideas on wound healing were put into practice during the Second World War.

Wright was assisted in Boulogne by Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) who, in 1928, would revolutionise medicine with his discovery of penicillin. In the 1930s Colebrook would again advance the use of antibiotics in treating diseases when he proved the effectiveness of Prontosil (one of the first commercial available antibiotics) in the treatment of Puerperal Fever. Puerperal, or child bed fever, is a bacterial infection contracted by women during childbirth, mainly as a result of poor hygiene. Up to the late nineteenth century it was a major cause of death in childbirth, with rates only beginning to fall when physicians began to understand the link between hygiene, contagion and puerperal fever. Colebrook's finding with Prontosil meant that the decreasing number of those affected by puerperal fever could be successfully treated.