The world could soon be "cast back into the dark ages of medicine" unless action is taken to tackle the growing threat of resistance to antibiotics, Prime Minister David Cameron has said.
Chief medical officer for England, Prof Dame Sally Davies, has been answering some of your questions about antibiotics.
@Nidgster tweets: Why are doctors so keen to give them out - for anything.
Dame Sally Davies answers: It is not fair to say that doctors give antibiotics out for anything. Doctors do want to meet their patients' expectations, and many say they often feel pressured into giving out a prescription. There is currently no test that doctors can do in their surgeries to check if a patient is unwell because of an infection caused by bacteria or a virus. This means that a doctor might prescribe the antibiotic as a precaution. However, last week, the public voted for antibiotics to be the subject of the £10m Longitude Prize to develop a rapid diagnostic that will enable doctors worldwide to properly identify those patients for whom antibiotics will actually be effective. This is testament to a growing public appreciation of the problems of antimicrobial resistance.