China warns on overuse of antibiotics

BEIJING, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- Health experts, warning against improper use of drugs, say more than a million Chinese children have been made deaf by misuse of the antibiotic streptomycin.

Yang Zhiyin, director of the behavioral medicine branch of the Chinese Medical Association, says of the 1.8 million deaf children on the Chinese mainland, 60 percent lost their hearing because of improper drug use, largely related to streptomycin, China Daily reported Wednesday.

About 200,000 people die in China each year from adverse drug reactions and 40 percent of the deaths are related to the abuse of antibiotics, Yang said.

Many Chinese families commonly stock antibiotics at home and most people have taken antibiotics without a doctor's guidance, medical authorities say.

Huang Liuyu, director of the Institute for Disease Prevention and Control of the People's Liberation Army, put some of the blame on doctors, however.

"Some doctors tend to prescribe the most advanced antibiotics for patients who could be cured with commonly used ones," Huang said. "Some do this to achieve the quickest and best result, while others do it to receive kickbacks from drug companies."

He called for strengthened surveillance and management of the problem by hospitals and health authorities.

Each person in China consumes an average of 138 grams of antibiotics a year, more than 10 times the amount taken by a person in the United States, Yang said.