Antibiotics - singular/ plural

Question

Hi,Here are two sentences extracted from a newspaper article:-Another medical mix-up has come to light, with a baby being wrongly injected with an antibiotic.A new mother mistakenly put her baby into another baby's cot at the Prince of Wales Hospital and a nurse gave her baby a dose of antibiotics mean for the second baby.Why is the first 'antibiotic' in the singular and the second one in the plural?Thanks in advance

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

I think that the plural is often used for a single dose of something that may contain several anti-biotic materials; it also refers to the method of treatment.

Combinations of antibiotics are sometimes needed to treat the following:

Severe infections, particularly during the first days when the bacteria's susceptibility to antibiotics is not known
Certain infections caused by bacteria that rapidly develop resistance to a single antibiotic
Infections caused by more than one type of bacteria if each type is susceptible to a different antibiotic.

Christanford · Answer

Thanks!
Do you think it is an error that the writer uses both the plural and singular forms to refer to the same thing?

RayH · Answer

ChristanfordDo you think it is an error that the writer uses both the plural and singular forms to refer to the same thing?

No. It's my experience that the singular and plural are used interchangeably. It depends far more on what sounds better in a particular context than on whether a particular formula contains multiple antibiotics. Note that most people have no idea what exactly makes up a particular antibiotic injection and, for the most part, they don't care.

Christanford · Answer

Thanks!

James Whitney Kahn Parker · Answer

The difference here is the difference in singular and plural. It's just a grammatical distinction. In the example with a plural, plural nouns would be used. In the example with the singular, singular nouns would be used.

Let's replace 'antibiotic' with cookie.

A new mother mistakenly put her baby into another baby's cot at the Prince of Wales Hospital and a nurse gave her baby a dose of cookies meant for the second baby.
A new mother mistakenly put her baby into another baby's cot at the Prince of Wales Hospital and a nurse gave her baby a dose of cookies meant for the second baby.
(the 'of' before the noun signals a plural. eg: a bunch of bricks, a lot of dinosaurs, a couple of grandparents. You wouldn't say, a couple of grandparent.
[You might say a dose of cookie, but only if it was a non-count noun, which means a noun which is never plural eg. milk, ham (unless you're talking about whole hams), clothing. But as the singular is used in the next example, we can see it is not a non-count noun.]

Another medical mix-up has come to light, with a baby being wrongly injected with an antibiotic.
Another medical mix-up has come to light, with a baby being wrongly injected with a cookie.

The 'a' here signals it will be a singular noun. For the first part, 'an' is used in lieu of 'a' because 'antibiotic' begins with a vowel sound. The n is there to hold the sound, but the grammatical meaning stays constant Eg: a waterfall, a didgeridoo, an orangutan, a very interesting day)
['a' is only used with countable nouns. Non-count nouns never appear in that form, because they cannot be grammatically quantified.]

Antibiotics - singular/ plural

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