Bacterial Resistance to Antibiotics

To the Editor.—  O'Brien and associates (239:1518, 1978) compared prevalence of bacterial resistance to antibiotics between hospitals in the United States and France. They reported increased bacterial resistance in the French hospital and suggested that this may be due to increased use of antibiotics in the French population. They implied, but did not document, that the patient populations in the various hospitals in the study were similar in regard to disease category. Instead of comparing patients by geographic and national separation, it would be interesting to compare antibiotic resistance by disease category. We suspect, for example, that athletes hospitalized for a torn tibial collateral ligament would have different levels of bacterial resistance than patients hospitalized for immune deficiency diseases, in whom antibiotic use would likely be more frequent.In a review of bacterial culture data of 217 children admitted within a three-month period to a 500-bed, acute-care general hospital in