Alpecin boss reveals all on secret pre-Tour of Flanders illness for Mathieu van der Poel: "He had to take antibiotics for three days"

Why Maria, what is your reasoning? He was already ill during E3, thought he’d get over it but it got worse which is probably when he took them. His doc will be amongst the best-informed and his infection perfectly analysed. Read this and stop relying on generalised outdated assumptions about antibiotical treatment, part of the reason they may soon no longer be effective at all. “ In 2008, one of us (L.B.R.) posited that of the different ways the medical community could reduce the amount of antibiotic treatment prescribed, the one that seemed safest and most achievable was to treat infections only for as long as necessary to achieve optimal cure rates (1). It is difficult and potentially dangerous for providers not to prescribe antibiotics at all, but it should be easier to convince them not to prescribe antibiotics for so long. The evidentiary basis of traditional durations of antibiotic therapy is that a week is 7 days (2), which is why tried-and-true antibiotic regimens are 7 to 14 days long. The definition of a week was decreed by Roman Emperor Constantine the Great nearly 2000 years ago (2). This seems an unsatisfactory evidentiary basis for modern medical practice. Fortunately, in recent years, more than 45 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have compared the efficacy of short-course versus traditional, longer courses of antibiotic therapy for the treatment of community-acquired and nosocomial pneumonia, acute exacerbation of chronic bronchitis and sinusitis, complicated urinary and intra-abdominal infections, Gram-negative bacteremia, acute bacterial skin infections, osteomyelitis and septic arthritis, and even neutropenic fever (3, 4). All RCTs for these diseases and 2 meta-analyses of these RCTs (5, 6) found no difference in efficacy between shorter and traditional courses of antibiotic therapy. Of note, the short-course regimens that were studied were typically not based on Constantine’s 7-day week. For pneumonia specifically, 8 RCTs have shown that 3- to 5-day courses of antibiotic therapy are at least as effective as 7- to 14-day courses for community-acquired pneumonia”