Brussels, 19/11/2001 (Agence Europe) - The European conference on the use of antibiotics in Europe, held in Brussels from 15 to 17 November, has allowed the new European network for the surveillance of the use of ESAC anti-microbial agents, that begun its work on 1 November, to be presented to the press. The network financed by the European Commission will be piloted by a team from the University of Antwerp headed by Profession Herman Goossens. It aims to collect by end 2003 data comparable in the fifteen Member States of the European Union as well as in other European countries (at the present time, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Iceland, Malta, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Lithuania). The only data currently available show a clear difference between the southern EU countries, and Belgium and Luxembourg, on one hand, and the countries in the North, on the other, where less antibiotics are consumed. Another feature is that antibiotics in the penicillin family are still widely used in the northern countries while the southern countries have practically stopped using penicillin. The consumption per thousand inhabitants and per day is the highest in France, decreasing to the Netherlands where the least are consumed.
The Belgian government seized the opportunity provided by this conference to announce the launching of a new campaign aimed at making the public and medical practitioners more aware of the over-use of antibiotics. Presenting this new campaign entitled "Antibiotics: to be used better but less" with a budget of EUR 400,000, Social Affairs Minister Frank Vandenbroucke stressed that a campaign of the same kind had already allowed a temporary reduction of 20% in the use of antibiotics. He spoke of the impact that general public advertising has in the United States (he recalled that the industry spent $1.8 billion in 1999 for this kind of advertising and that, according to the British Medical Journal there was a 34% increase between 1998 and 1999 in the number of prescriptions for the 25 products advertised as opposed to only 5.1% for the other medicines). Mr Vandenbroucke recalled that such advertising is still banned in Europe. He regretted the European Commission's initiative aimed at allowing partial authorisation, considering that it could have a major influence on the relationship between patients and doctors as well as on health system budgets. "I do not believe it would be a step in the right direction", he said.