Antibiotics resistance is a serious and fast developing global problem. If we do not act we may not any longer be able to successfully treat life threatening infections.
What can we do to slow down this development?
Avoid treating patients who do not need antibiotics is the trick. These are the ones who do not have a bacterial infection as the cause of their illness, but also otherwise healthy patients with mild and non-serious bacterial infections. The vast majority of those latter patients will cure spontaneously without any antibiotics treatment.
Diagnostics is key
HNL is the superior means to distinguish between acute bacterial or viral infection.
HNL was shown superior to currently used biomarkers such as CRP, procalcitonin and CD64 expression on neutrophil granulocytes. Sensitivities and specificities achieved were between 90-95%. By adding some other biomarkers to an algorithm the diagnostic performance of HNL increased to almost perfection (JIM 2019)
