Popping pills for every minor pain or fever might not be such a good idea after all, with a new study showing that antibiotics administered to cure certain diseases might end up causing more harm than good to patients.

A study carried out by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences showed, that 15 per cent of patients taking antibiotics for various diseases suffered from diarrhoea, termed as antibiotic associated diarrhoea.

The disease, caused by a specific bacteria called 'Clostridium difficile', can be life-threatening in extreme circumstances - exclaimed ProfessorcRama Chaudhry of the Micro-Biology Department of AIIMS, under whose supervision the study was carried out.

The symptoms might vary from slight abdominal discomfort to severe diarrhoea to colitis. Such cases can be treated with metronidazole or vancomycin, which are antibiotics themselves.

Chaudhry said, a perceptible decrease in incidents of such 'Diarrhoea' was observed in AIIMS, after preventive measures were taken like carrying out proper tests before administering antibiotics.

The most vulnerable to this form of diarrhoea were cancer patients, old people and those whose general immunity was very low, including HIV positive people. The study was conducted in various departments of the premier medical institution between January 2001 and December 2005. The tests were carried out on stool samples of patients, who had been administered antibiotics.

A total of 524 samples were tested for toxins A and B through the Elisa test. In the current study, there was no gender prevalence among the positive cases and the median age of positive cases was 39 years. The highest percentage of culture positives were seen among patients above 60 years of age.

The easiest tests to determine the bacteria are the 'Elisa test' and the molecular or DNA tests on stool samples. The highest number of toxin positive cases (67.5 per cent) were from stool samples of patients hospitalised in the 'Cancer ward', followed by gastrointestinal surgery, neurology and nephrology wards.

Apart from the two antibiotics, an effective way of treating such diarrhoea is through probiotics. "We require a global awareness policy to contain the strain of bacteria. In countries like Canada, it has turned mutant and was now a life-threatening condition," Chaudhry said.

Chaudhry also added, that the facility of screening for this strain was not available in most hospitals of the country, and PGI, Chandigarh and AIIMS were the places - where most of the tests were being carried out.