A 2000 presidential report described iatrogenic error and illness as "a national problem of epidemic proportions," causing tens of thousands of annual deaths. The report estimated the cost of lost income, disability, and health care costs to be $29 billion a year. The report concluded that half of adverse medical events were preventable.
The presidential report relied heavily upon another report by the Institute of Medicine, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System (2000). Issued by the most respected agency of American medicine, To Err is Human generated considerable attention and surprise by concluding that up to 98,000 Americans are killed annually by medical errors. This number slightly exceeds the combined total of those killed in one year by motor vehicle accidents (43,458), breast cancer (42,297), and AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, 16,516).
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that each year nearly 2 million people acquire infections while hospitalized and about 90,000 die from those infections. More than 70 percent of hospital-acquired bacterial infections have become resistant to at least one of the drugs commonly used to treat them. Staphylococcus aureus (staph), the leading cause of hospital-acquired infections, is resistant to 95 percent of first-choice antibiotics, and about 30 percent of second-choice antibiotics.
In New York City alone, treatment of people with hospital-acquired staph infections exceeds $400 million, according to a study published in 1999. Researchers found that staph infections doubled the length of hospitalization, and more than doubled the patient death rate and per patient costs.
The CDC proposes several methods of reducing hospital-acquired infections. The most important include more discriminating antibiotic use and improved hygiene of hospital staff, the main source of infections.
The modern state is, as Thomas Szasz has described it in Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001), a "therapeutic state" in which medical providers have far more power than consumers. Such an imbalance of power may make consumers increasingly vulnerable to the factors that cause iatrogenic illness to be an important cause of illness and death.
