Recent research performed by the Centers for Disease Control and the Pew Charitable Trust has found that antibiotics are being over prescribed and that over 30% are really useless and not needed. It is one of the most intensive and thorough studies ever done on the subject and the results have been published in JAMA.
In all, this amounts to nearly 50 million unnecessary prescriptions for children and adults every year be they from emergency rooms, primary care physicians or hospitals and clinics. Unfortunately, most antibiotics are prescribed for such things as the common cold, sore throats, viral situations, bronchitis and many other ailments and afflictions that don’t even respond to antibiotics.
While health experts have been decrying the overuse of antibiotics for many decades, this is the first study that has been able to assemble hard facts and numbers regarding it. Because of the over prescribing, experts suggests, resistant bacteria has been allowed to develop and evolve.
In one year period from 2010-2011, over 40% of all antibiotics that were prescribed at out patient visits were for respiratory illnesses and infections against which antibiotics are useless and never should have been prescribed. These years form the basis for the CDC study. And, of course, prescriptions for antibiotics accounts for most of the revenue generated by the drug companies that produce them.
Director of the CDC, Tom Frieden, said that, “Antibiotics are life saving drugs and if we continue down the road of inappropriate use we’ll lose the most powerful tool we have to fight life threatening infections.”
The research made some major discoveries among them is that nearly half of all the prescriptions written are for ailments against which antibiotics will do nothing and that over 150 million outpatient visits every year result in the patient leaving with a prescription. The CDC, however, suggests that doctors are somehow forced by patients or the parents of underage children to prescribe these antibiotics.
The study just concerned itself with prescriptions that were written by doctor’s and did not take into any account the prescriptions written by physician’s assistants and by nurse practitioners.
PHOTO SOURCE: Picjumbo