Health Check Ep 23: Why you shouldn't demand antibiotics for your flu

12:43 mins

Synopsis: In this fortnightly podcast series on Wednesdays, The Straits Times guides you to healthier living and clears up some common misconceptions on health. In this episode, ST correspondent Joyce Teo and podcasting head Ernest Luis host Associate Professor Hsu Li Yang - the head of the infectious diseases programme and the co-director of the Leadership Institute for Global Health Transformation at the NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health. He tells us more about antimicrobial and antibiotic resistance and what to know and do about it.

He answers the following questions: 

1. The difference between antimicrobial resistance and antibiotic resistance

2. Is there the same urgent "climate change" mentality when it comes to the problem of recognising antibiotic resistance?

3. Costly effects of drug-resistant bacteria in human medicine

4. Antibiotics being used as growth promoters in animal farming, and does it affect kampung chicken?

5. If you have a bacterial infection as opposed to a viral infection, what should you do?

Prof Hsu has also worked on a graphic novel with award-winning Singaporean cartoonist Sonny Liew and Epigram Books. Called The Antibiotic Tales, it aims to explain antimicrobial resistance - the ability of microbes to evolve and resist the drugs used to kill them - to the lay reader.

Produced by: Joyce Teo and Ernest Luis

Edited by: Adam Azlee

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