Some Stats on Antibiotics

ANTIBIOTICS

U.S. livestock consumed about 28.9-million pounds of antibiotics in 2009, about four times the human medical antibiotic use of 7.3-million pounds.

The CDC warns that 90% of upper respiratory infections, including children's ear infections, are viral and that antibiotics do not treat viral infection. More than 40% of about 50 million prescriptions for antibiotics written each year in physicians' offices are inappropriate.

The effects of a single course of antibiotics on specific microbial populations in vivo can persist for years.

The long-term consequences of such perturbations for the human–microbial symbiosis are more difficult to discern, but chronic conditions such as asthma and atopic disease have been associated with childhood antibiotic use… with implications for cancer and obesity, among other conditions

The acute effects of antibiotic treatment on the native gut microbiota range from self-limiting “functional” diarrhea to life-threatening pseudomembranous colitis.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the consumption of 235 million doses of antibiotics in 2001 and estimated that 20-50 percent of these were unnecessarily prescribed for viral infections.

Antibiotics Put 142,000 into Emergency Rooms each year

Almost 2 million Americans per year develop hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), resulting in 99,000 deaths, the vast majority of which are due to antibacterial (antibiotic)-resistant pathogens.

The annual cost to the US health care system of antibiotic-resistant infections is $21 billion to $34 billion and more than 8 million additional hospital days.

Although an overwhelming majority of upper respiratory tract infections are of viral origin, more than 50% of patients diagnosed with colds, upper respiratory tract infections, or bronchitis were prescribed antibiotics in an analysis of the 1992 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey

Between 1.3 million and 2.8 million children with sore throats are getting antibiotics unnecessarily each year.

Antibiotics cost the U.S. about $15 billion per year. Extra hospital costs associated with drug-resistant hospital-acquired bacterial infections total at least $1.3 billion annually. Of 51 million visits to physicians for "colds," upper-respiratory infections and bronchitis, 50% to 66% resulted in an antibiotic prescription, even though these conditions usually do not require antibiotics.

In 1941, only 40,000 units of penicillin per day for four days was used to cure pneumococcal pneumonia. By 1992, a patient could receive 24 million units of penicillin per day and die of pneumococcal meningitis.

Antimicrobial resistance was recently recognized as one of the greatest threats to human health on the planet
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