alt Hacker News> about 7 out of 10 people in the U.S. were prescribed antibiotics in 2024 according to <CDC data>.
This blew my mind so I double checked the source. It links to https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/hcp/data-research/antibio... which contains some numbers but not the claim. It links to various reports, the latest one (2024 at the time of writing) https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/media/pdfs/2024-Annual-Re... says at the top of page 2 that the prescription rate is 679 and 775 doses per 1000 people in 2024, depending on the gender. That matches the 7-in-10 number so I'm guessing this is where the statistic comes from
Doesn't that reflect how many prescriptions there were rather than what number of people got it prescribed? See also page 3 where Mississippi has 1167 doses per 1000 persons. Either the number of people is wrong (if the prescription given to a tourist and counted towards this statistic, the tourist should also be counted as person, but the CDC says they take the population count from a census) or it's about doses and not about what part of the population got an antibiotic in the last year. In both of these cases, you can't conclude 116.7% of people got antibiotics prescribed. The claim in the article based on that CDC data sounds to me like saying 520% of the people drink alcohol when, in reality, 10% drinks a bottle a week and the rest nil
I'm probably misunderstanding the CDC report but I'm not sure how I should be able to tell that
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Yes, it's "number of prescriptions" (but not "number of people prescribed" or "number of doses"). One person could be prescribed an antibiotic (or multiple) several times a year.
I'm amazed that there are 1216 antibiotic prescriptions per 1000 people per year in West Virginia though (2.5x the rate of California or Colorado, which itself frankly seems pretty high). Are large parts of the South just awash with bacterial infections, are people being prescribed antibiotics for viral illnesses, or are they just taking antibiotics prophylactically?
I had 2 or 3 rounds of antibiotics and steroids in 2025 for a stubborn ear infection.
Wait is that individual doses? Like one prescription would commonly be for 20-30 doses.
Yes I stopped reading there after checking the source myself and seeing the same discrepancy. I had also noticed earlier in the article she wrote, "This finding was great news for Napoleon. The French were losing money, and perhaps more alarmingly, their reputation, exporting wine to the British – the wine would “spontaneously” go bad during shipping."
Pasteur was born after Napoleon was exiled. Maybe she is referring to Napoleon III, but then it's misleading to just write "Napoleon." Two factual mistakes in the first couple pages and I can't trust the rest. Especially on a topic I know little about so I can't be discerning regarding.
There's no way 7 in 10 people were prescribed antibiotics in 2024. This looks like a simple and egregious misinterpretation of the data, which seem to be all too common. I could believe there were 700 prescriptions given in the US per 1000 people in the US population. But many of those would be repeats to the same smaller number of people. I still would say there's way too much antiobiotic use - every time doctors have wanted to give me antiobiotics it wasn't necessary.