Fatal Reactions to Drug Therapy

During recent hearings of the Senate Health Subcommittee on the "Kennedy Drug Bill" a curious numbers game was played with the ultimate in adverse drug reactions: those that kill the patient. Initially, wide publicity was given to an unsubstantiated estimate of 30,000 deaths resulting from drug therapy each year in the United States. Subsequently, this mythical number was gradually inflated to 140,000 on the basis of misleading extrapolations from two recent surveys on acute medical services.In 1971 the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program reported that for 27 (0.44 per cent) of 6199 consecutively monitored medical patients in eight teaching . . .