Mother’s Misusing of Antibiotics for their Preschool Children

Abstract

Antibiotics are medicines used to treat diseases such as (but not limited to) tuberculosis, urinary tract infections, acne, bronchitis and pneumonia. Antibiotics are effective only on infections and illnesses caused by bacteria as they block vital processes in bacteria, kill the bacteria and in that way help body’s immune system to fight bacterial infections (WHO, 2015). Global, widespread use of antibiotics in health care, animal health and food production has led to a serious overuse and abuse of antibiotics. As a result, there has been an emergence of a phenomenon called antimicrobial resistance (AMR), defined as a microorganism’s resistance to an antimicrobial drug to which it was once effective (WHO, 2016). Misusing of antibiotics is a vital societal health problem. The preschool children are the possibility of receiving unnecessary antibiotics for any infections, parents who still obtain antibiotics without medical prescription and self-treat with antibiotics, thus, parent's misconceptions about antibiotic usage and resistance persist, considered the crucial community issues that threaten the preschool children (Van Hecke et al., 2019). Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that 4 out of 10 children are