Sustainability for behaviour change in the fight against antibiotic resistance: a social marketing framework.

Antibiotic resistance is one of today's most urgent public health problems, threatening to undermine the effectiveness of infectious disease treatment in every country of the world. Specific individual behaviours such as not taking the entire antibiotic regimen and skipping doses contribute to resistance development as does the taking of antibiotics for colds and other illnesses that antibiotics cannot treat. Antibiotic resistance is as much a societal problem as it is an individual one; if mass behaviour change across the population does not occur, the problem of resistance cannot be mitigated at community levels.