MIAMI – AUGUST 07: Rosemary Petty, a pharmacy technician at Publix Supermarket, counts a … [+]
In a recent study, a group of economists found that taxing some antibiotics that are more profitable than others could be a highly effective measure to prevent doctors from overprescribing these drugs and slow the ongoing antibiotic resistance crisis.
“Today, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become a global threat with an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide annually and has raised calls for a global response,” the authors wrote in the study published in the journal The Guardian. International Journal of Industrial Organization.
“If the problem is left unchecked, as many as 10 million lives a year and as much as $100 trillion in output could be at risk globally by 2050,” added co-author Farasat Bokhari of Loughborough University and colleagues.
Antibiotics used to fight bacterial infections are classified as narrow- or broad-spectrum drugs.
While narrow-spectrum drugs target a very specific set of bacterial pathogens, they spare other types of good bacteria in your gut. They can also help slow antibiotic resistance, because doctors can only prescribe them if they know which bacteria are wreaking havoc on their patients’ health. But the problem, the authors explained, is that doctors can indiscriminately prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics when the causative pathogen is unknown – which has exacerbated the antibiotic resistance crisis in recent decades.
In a press release, Bokhari said: “In our analysis, the financial burden of the tax does not fall on patients, but rather on GP practices, who may in some cases overprescribe medicines. Our findings show that switching from broad spectrum to narrow spectrum is possible through changes in relative prices achieved through taxes, but that this has consequences – in terms of the total costs to society.”
“While the alternative tax regimes we consider differ in the extent to which demand will shift, our estimates suggest that these policies could be very effective in managing that demand,” Bokhari said.
The authors analyzed monthly sales of antibiotics prescribed in Britain over ten years. The team then used economic modeling to take into account several concerns, such as the impact on antibiotic prices, the chemical characteristics of these drugs and seasonality.
They found that a 20% tax on all antibiotics reduces the use of these drugs by 12.7%. But their estimates showed that this could result in the number of doctors prescribing broad-spectrum antibiotics decreasing by just 29%.
When they imposed the 20% tax on broad-spectrum antibiotics alone, they calculated that their use could fall by 37.7%.
In a press release, the study’s lead author, Weijie Yan of E.CA Economics, said: “The consumer welfare loss and overall welfare loss from taxing these antibiotics are significant, but they are relatively small compared to the predicted social costs . of antibiotic resistance in terms of deaths and economic losses. While our simulations show how much demand has shifted from broad spectrum to narrow spectrum, and at what cost, they do not calculate the long-term benefits of switching to drugs with a lower antimicrobial resistance footprint.”
“It is also clear that the estimated welfare loss is much smaller than previous estimates of global costs, and so it may be worthwhile to consider such solutions to shift demand to narrow-spectrum drugs,” Yan added to it.
