As Shelita mentioned, a paper that came out just this week showed that one out of every five patients who receives antibiotics gets adverse effects that are directly related to the antibiotic. Those adverse effects lead to increased lengths of stay in hospitalized patients. For a patient, one extra day of hospitalization alone trumps another 10 or even 100 patients receiving antibiotics on any one day. If we're talking about one out of every five, you can just imagine what that impact is on the health care system.
Out in the community, it's much more difficult to quantify the costs associated with it. We know, for example, that about 20% of human antibiotic prescribing in the community is done by dentists. Most of those are unnecessary. Many of those result in adverse effects that are mostly mild gastrointestinal effects, but in using back-of-the-napkin math, we can figure out that there are probably dozens of deaths in Canada each year from patients receiving unnecessary antibiotics for dental procedures.
The costs are in lives.