Doctors struggling to decide whether a wheezing patient needs antibiotics to treat pneumonia are about to get a simple, 15-minute test to help their diagnosis. It uses a patient's urine to detect a bacterium called Streptococcus pneumoniae, which is estimated to cause 500,000 cases of pneumonia a year. The test should help doctors decide more quickly if a patient's pneumonia is caused by that bacteria, and thus what treatment is needed. Just this month, the government announced that infections caused by antibiotic-resistant Strep pneumoniae are on the rise.
Antibiotics have no effect on viruses.
They kill only bacteria. But symptoms alone don't let doctors tell if pneumonia is caused by a virus or bacteria. Conventional pneumonia tests analyze either phlegm or blood and can take two to three days to more than a week. Unnecessary use of antibiotics leads other bacteria in the body to evolve resistance to the drugs. That could mean that if the patient were to contract a bacterial infection later, antibiotics might not help.