New research by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a higher than expected rate of people arriving at hospital emergency rooms with adverse allergic reactions to antibiotics.
The solution, the researchers say, is to decrease the number of prescriptions by using these powerful medications only in cases where they are likely to help, rather than for viral infections for which they are inappropriate.
Because the vast majority of adverse events were allergic reactions, they are mostly not preventable except by reducing the number of prescriptions, Dr. Shehab and colleagues said.
That may be advisable, they added.
”Avoiding unnecessary antibiotic use reduces not only the public health threat of antibiotic resistance but also the risk of drug-related adverse events in individual patients,” the researchers wrote.
”More than one-half of the estimated 100 million antibiotic prescriptions written in the community each year for respiratory tract infections may be unnecessary,” they said. “Decreasing inappropriate antibiotic use by even a small percentage could substantially reduce the number of patients who experience antibiotic-associated adverse events.”
