This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Antibiotic treatment increased risk of trachoma reinfection

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

Treating patients with trachoma using oral azithromycin significantly increased the risk of their reinfection, a prospective study found.

The finding suggests that azithromycin may interrupt the duration of infection required for developing immunity to trachoma, thereby increasing the risk of reinfection, the study authors said.

Berna Atik, MD, MPH, and colleagues at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, Calif., examined the effects of antibiotic treatment for trachoma, as recommended in the World Health Organization's SAFE strategy, on reinfection risks.

The SAFE strategy was developed in 1996 with the goal of eliminating trachoma by 2020 using four care aspects — surgery, antibiotics, facial cleanliness and environmental improvement. The strategy recommended use of either topical tetracycline or oral azithromycin for antibiotic treatment.

The study included 3,186 patients drawn from three randomly selected communes in Vietnam, one of 16 countries targeted with the SAFE strategy. Patients in one commune who received surgery only served as a control group. Patients in a second commune received surgery and antibiotics (SA group), and patients in a third commune received all four aspects of the SAFE strategy (SAFE group), the study authors said.

Between 12 and 36 months, the researchers found that the reinfection rate increased from 1.6 to 29.3 per 1,000 persons in the SAFE group (P < .001) and from 5.1 to 25.3 per 1,000 persons in the SA group (P = .002). In contrast, reinfection rates in the surgery-only group were four times lower than the other two groups, decreasing from 13.4 to 6.5 per 1,000 persons (P = .55), according to the study.

Further research is needed to determine optimal trachoma control methods, including separate evaluation of the facial cleansing and environmental improvement components of the SAFE strategy, the authors noted.

The study is published in the September 27 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.