Antibiotic Selection Pressure And Macrolide Resistance In Nasopharyngeal Streptococcus Pneumoniae: A Cluster-Randomized Clinical Trial

Jeremy Keenan and colleagues report that during a cluster-randomized clinical trial in Ethiopia, nasopharyngeal pneumococcal resistance to macrolides was significantly higher in communities randomized to receive azithromycin compared with untreated control communities.



Funding: The National Institutes of Health (NEI U10 EY016214) was the main supporter of this trial. This project was also supported by the Bernard Osher Foundation, That Man May See, the Harper Inglis Trust, the Bodri Foundation, the South Asia Research Fund, Research to Prevent Blindness, NIH/NCRR/OD UCSF-CTSI KL2 RR024130, and NIH/NEI K23EY019071. The International Trachoma Initiative generously donated the azithromycin used for this study. The funders of the trial had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or the preparation of the manuscript.



Competing Interests: James H Jorgensen was an Advisory board member for BD Diagnostics and has received research support from BD Diagnostics, bioMerieux, Merck and Pfizer.



Citation: Skalet AH, Cevallos V, Ayele B, Gebre T, Zhou Z, et al. (2010) Antibiotic Selection Pressure and Macrolide Resistance in Nasopharyngeal Streptococcus pneumoniae: A Cluster-Randomized Clinical Trial. PLoS Med 7(12): e1000377. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000377