Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers. Today, dentists and antibiotics.

Liz Zabo is an investigative reporter with Sidrap News. She joins Dr. Josh

Sharfstein to talk about a recent series on the overuse of antibiotics by dentists. Let's listen.

Liz Zabo, thanks so much for joining me today. We're going to be talking about antibiotic use and

dentists. How did you get interested in this topic?

I've covered antibiotic resistance for a number of years, but it's always been on the medical side.

Late last year, I got an email from a gentleman who is fairly traumatized by the death of his mom due to C. diff,

and it's likely she contracted the C. diff

because of a dental antibiotic. She was prescribed clandemycin after getting a routine tooth

extraction, and within days she had some pretty awful symptoms. Well, there's a lot to unpack there.

So let's take a little bit of a step back, but then we'll get right into that story. Why have you been covering antibiotics for so many years? Well, it's antibiotic resistance. According to experts, really poses a sort of existential threat. Antibiotics have been some of the most important technological, medical breakthroughs,

and they allowed people to not only survive infections, to not die because you prick your arm on a rosebush

while gardening. But they've also allowed people to get through surgeries and have cancer

therapies and cancer treatments where it really put you at

risk. So if our antibiotics stop working, a lot of our other medical interventions could fall

apart. It can easily sound sort of apocalyptic. Yeah. And what you're talking about is resistance

so that if you use antibiotics too much, then the microorganisms might adapt and suddenly

the antibiotics don't work anymore.

...