(ANNOUNCER OPEN):
A recent study provides evidence that the use of antibiotics is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. To gather the necessary data, researchers used computerized pharmacy and breast-cancer-screening databases. They compared the antibiotic use of more than two-thousand women with breast cancer with similar information from almost eight-thousand women without breast cancer. A co-author of the study--Doctor Stephen Taplin of the National Cancer Institute--says researchers examined a wide variety of the most-frequently-prescribed antibiotic medications...

(TAPLIN):
"...And, what we found was that the people with cancer were more likely to have used antibiotics. And, in fact, women who had breast cancer were twice as likely to have had more than 25 prescriptions or more than 500 days of antibiotic use accumulated over the course of an average of about 17 years."

(ANNOUNCER CLOSE):
Doctor Taplin says the results of this study do not mean that antibiotics cause breast cancer--but that there is an association between the two. And, these study results do not mean that women should stop taking antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. Doctor Taplin adds that, until researchers understand more about the association between antibiotics and cancer, people should take into account the substantial benefits that antibiotics can have--but they should continue to use these medicines wisely. This is Calvin Jackson, the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.