By Martha Men­doza and Margie Mason

(AP) OSLO, Nor­way — Aker Uni­ver­sity Hos­pi­tal is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pres­sure mon­i­tors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bed­sheets dropped in a corner.

Look closer, how­ever, at a micro­scopic level, and this place is pris­tine. There is no sign of a dan­ger­ous and con­ta­gious staph infec­tion that killed tens of thou­sands of patients in the most sophis­ti­cated hos­pi­tals of Europe, North Amer­ica and Asia last year, soar­ing vir­tu­ally unchecked.

The rea­son: Nor­we­gians stopped tak­ing so many drugs.

Twenty-​​five years ago, Nor­we­gians were also los­ing their lives to this bac­te­ria. But Norway’s pub­lic health sys­tem fought back with an aggres­sive pro­gram that made it the most infection-​​free coun­try in the world. A key part of that pro­gram was cut­ting back severely on the use of antibiotics.

Now a spate of new stud­ies from around the world prove that Norway’s model can be repli­cated with extra­or­di­nary suc­cess, and pub­lic health experts are say­ing these deaths — 19,000 in the U.S. each year alone, more than from AIDS — are unnecessary.

Read the rest: Nor­way con­quers infec­tions by cut­ting use of antibi­otics — Nation — Miami​Her​ald​.com.