Antibiotics cause serious side effects to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of people every year

We all know that antibiotics are being over-prescribed, heralding in the age of the superbug—but, in the meantime, they’re causing serious side effects in hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Around one in 300 patients prescribed an antibiotic suffer side effects that are so bad that they need medical care.  “It may not seem a lot but when you look at the problem on a population health level, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of serious adverse reactions,” said Harris Carmichael, a researcher from Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City.

Carmichael and his research team estimate that enough antibiotics are prescribed in the US every year to cover 80 percent of the population.  They examined 51 million patient reports of people with upper respiratory infections, a condition for which antibiotics are wrongly prescribed in roughly half of all cases.

Those given an antibiotic were up to a third more likely to suffer a serious adverse reaction—including a deadly diarrheal infection—than those given other drugs. In all, one in 300 people given an antibiotic suffered a reaction that needed medical treatment.

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