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Antimicrobial resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae, seen since the late 1970s, is a major public health problem worldwide. Both resistance and antibiotic consumption vary greatly among the European countries. In a recent industry-supported study, investigators examined the relation between resistance and use in 15 European nations. The researchers obtained antibiotic-consumption data for the years 1998–2004 from the European Surveillance of Antimicrobial Consumption project; they determined resistance rates using 1974 pneumococcal isolates recovered from patients with community-acquired respiratory tract infections during the winter of 2004–2005.
Antibiotic use was highest in France, Greece, and the Slovak Republic (32, 30, and 26 defined …