Antibiotics abuse might be dangerous.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – A recent study has proved that people from U.S. take one in three prescriptions of antibiotics which are not appropriate.
According to a report from the Journal Of The American Medical Association (JAMA), the inappropriate use of antibiotics can lead to severe infections which could grow resistant to this type of medication. Because of this, 23,000 people die each year, and another two million suffer grave consequences in the U.S. alone.
According to this study, 262 million antibiotic prescriptions were given out in 2011, meaning that almost each of the nation’s 300 million people received one. What makes it worse is that people who ‘benefited’ from these prescriptions are not even patients.
Katherine Fleming-Dutra, a doctor at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and her colleagues developed a program to find out how many unnecessary prescriptions people receive, depending on their diagnosis and age.
One of the important things they found out was that the most common diagnoses which were linked to antibiotic prescriptions were sore throats, ear infections, and sinusitis. Put together, the respiratory conditions which are considered to be acute, led to 221 antibiotic prescriptions per thousand people each year. It was estimated that out of these 221, half of them were unnecessary.
Furthermore, depending on the diagnosis and age, there was a total of approximately 506 antibiotic prescriptions per thousand people annually. Out these 506, only 353 turned out to be appropriate, meaning that the rest of 153 were wrong. Such a high number can quickly draw severe consequences depending on every person.
Put together, regarding all conditions, around 30 percent of the oral antibiotic prescriptions may have been inappropriate. The White House National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria has developed a study to reduce at least 15 percent of the entire antibiotic use. The goal is to mitigate this consumption by 50 percent until 2020.
One strategy to avoid antibiotics would be to educate patients to understand the role of this medication and to convince doctors to have a different approach to people, by using other methods of helping them depending on the diagnosis and age.
Hopefully, this initiative will lead in the future to a significant drop of any antibiotic.
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