Patients are being urged to play their part in stamping out antibiotic resistance.

Resistance is caused by people taking the medicines when they are not needed or not using them properly.

The bugs then learn how the antibiotic works and change so they can survive and breed.

Dr Jeffrie Strang, Scarborough, Whitby and Ryedale Primary Care Trust's director of public health, said: "Patients sometimes ask for antibiotics inappropriately. For our health community to control antibiotic resistance we need to make sure that antibiotics are only used when they are needed. There are very few new antibiotics being developed, so we need to keep the ones we have effective."

He added: "For some patients, antibiotics are life-saving and we all need to prevent resistance to make sure they still work for us all when they are truly needed. It is the bug which becomes resistant not the person, so we can all play our part to keep antibiotics working."

The key messages are:

Antibiotics stop working if we over use them

They do not work for viruses and antibiotics should never be used "just in case"

Sometimes the side effects, like diarrhoea and thrush, are more likely than a cure - and they "kill off" our friendly bacteria.

Updated: 11:05 Friday, October 07, 2005