Bad reactions to antibiotics afflict thousands each year
Doctors urged to restrict use
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WASHINGTON - Bad reactions to antibiotics, mostly allergic ones, send people to US emergency rooms more than 140,000 times each year, government researchers reported yesterday.
The findings offer another reason for doctors to limit their use of the drugs, which are overused in the United States, the team at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
"This number is an important reminder for physicians and patients that antibiotics can have serious side effects and should only be taken when necessary," said Dr. Daniel Budnitz of the CDC, who led the study.
The study used a sample of adverse drug reactions recorded at 63 US hospitals between 2004 and 2006.
The researchers found that more than 6,600 emergency visits during the period were due to an adverse reaction to antibiotics. They extrapolated this to the whole country and estimated that 142,000 such emergency visits are made every year.
"Systemic antibiotics [pills or injections as opposed to creams] were implicated in 19.3 percent of all emergency department visits for drug-related adverse events," they wrote in the Sept. 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Penicillin and related antibiotics such as amoxicillin, widely prescribed and widely seen as safe, accounted for half the emergency visits. Other classes of antibiotics such as cephalosporins, fluoroquinolones, and newer antibiotics accounted for the rest.
Persons 15 to 44 years old accounted for an estimated 41.2 percent of emergency department visits. Infants accounted for only an estimated 6.3 percent of such visits, they found.
Budnitz and colleagues said 78 percent of the adverse events in the study were allergic reactions, ranging from rash to a serious reaction known as anaphylaxis, and the remaining 22 percent were caused by errors and overdoses.
Many studies have suggested that half of the estimated 100 million antibiotic prescriptions written for respiratory tract infections in the United States are unnecessary. Most such infections are caused by viruses, and antibiotics are useless against them.
