Treating scarlet fever

SIR – The outbreak of scarlet fever (report, April 6) should come as no surprise to the medical profession.

It is a classic case of the law of unintended consequences. Scarlet fever occurs secondarily to a bacterial, streptococcal sore throat. General practitioners have been instructed not to treat sore throats with antibiotics, on the grounds that most sore throats are viral in origin and there is growing resistance to our current arsenal of antibiotics.

As a result, an ever-increasing number of bacterial sore throats are going untreated, leading to scarlet fever. The tragedy of this epidemic will become apparent when we have to start treating the later consequences of infection, namely rheumatic fever – which can cause damage to heart valves – and kidney disease.

Doctors, and especially GPS, are being encouraged to treat medicine as if it were a paint-by-numbers exercise, rather than use their judgment to heal the patient in front of them.

Dr Steven R Hopkins

Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands