Bad reactions to antibiotics send nearly 70,000 children to the emergency room a year, new research reveals.
Few drugs are prescribed more often than antibiotics, which treat many bacterial infections.
Children are particularly susceptible to these infections, but even more so to viral infections.
Doctors write some 74 million antibiotic prescriptions a year, the latest data reveals – and many of them are likely useless against illnesses that are actually caused by viruses.
And the medications make tens of thousands of those kids sick in a different way, according to the analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nearly 70,000 children wind up in US emergency rooms with bad reactions to antibiotics they probably didn’t need in the first place, new research warns
Humans in general, and Americans in particular, take too many drugs.
It’s not just the opioid epidemic that poses dangers to our health; in fact, taking too many antibiotics to help us fight of infections may be doing the greatest harm of all.
Antibiotic over-prescribing is setting the stage for the next plague-level pandemic, public health experts have warned.
Humans are rapidly becoming resistant to every antibiotic, meaning that the bacteria the drugs are intended to fight have been exposed to the medicines and evolved to outsmart them.
And the youngest children are likely the ones that doctors over-prescribe to the most.
Children under two have less developed immune systems, so they tend to get sick more often than older children and adults do.
Being new parents, their mothers and fathers may also be more likely to be anxious about their children’s health, which likely adds to the expectation pressure on physicians to send them home with a medication.
As a result, children under two are prescribed twice as many antibiotics as older kids get.
And the under-twos are far more likely to end up in the emergency room with a bad reaction to one of these drugs.
‘Antibiotics are life-saving medications used to treat and prevent bacterial infections, but it’s very important to only use all medications when the benefits are going to outweigh the risks,’ study co-author Dr Katherine Fleming-Dutra told Daily Mail Online.
‘There’s the antibiotic resistance risk, but you can also have adverse side effects like allergic reactions.’
For amoxicillin, for example, one of the most commonly prescribed treatments for sicknesses like strep through, ER visits were four times more common among children under two than for those between 10 and 19.
More than 85 percent of the 70,000 estimated annual children’s ER visits were for allergic reactions, involving symptoms as mild as a rash or as serious as anaphylactic shock.
The majority of these reactions on the mild side, so the allergies themselves pose a minimal danger in most cases, though the more severe reactions can prove fatal.
And there is really no way for a doctor to know whether a child – especially those under two with no medical history to speak of – will have an allergy without administering tests to that effect (which takes more time, and money, for the family).
But, the study authors advise, there is one way to avoid children’s bad reactions and trips to the ER over antibiotics: prescribe them less.
About one third of antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary, according to the latest data from the CDC.
Recent public health initiatives sounding the alarm over antibiotic resistance – especially to pediatricians – have helped to reduce over-prescription to the youngest children, a fact that the study authors are tepidly encouraged by.
The high number of children that wind up in the ER after taking an antibiotic that may not have done anything to clear their infections any way underscores the need to further reign in prescription rates.
‘Not all [adverse reactions to antibiotics] can be avoided, minimizig unnecessary antibiotic prescribing can reduce the burden of acute antibiotic-related harms and help preserve antibiotic efficacy,’ the authors wrote in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society.