“Further comment on Amoxycillin, mentioned recently in email of the day 2. When I sent in my original observation on the use of Amoxycillin as a treatment for chest infections in dogs, (very honoured to see my email in print) I was of course using it some 20 years ago when antibiotic resistance was a minor problem. Things are very different now. The truth is that since 1987 there has not been any new class of antibiotics developed. It has simply not proved to be a profitable proposition for drug companies to fund research and development into a drug that will possibly be used in a patient over a period of some five to seven days. Far more profitable it seems, in an era of a rapid increase in the elderly population to develop drugs that are going to be used by this group over many years or even decades.

David Fuller's view

Many thanks for this follow up.  You obviously know more about this than I do and I decided to also run it past your fellow subscriber, Dr David Brown, who is a specialist in this field and the author of Email of the day 2 below.