This data note examines the public’s knowledge and concerns about antibiotic resistance, a topic of increasing importance to both the United States and the wider global health community. The World Health Organization ranked antibiotic resistance as one of the top ten threats to global health for the year 2019, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that antibiotic resistance causes over 2 million infections and 23,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.
While a majority of the public say they have heard of antibiotic resistance and know what it means (71 percent) and most think the overuse of antibiotics is a major problem (53 percent), public knowledge of the issue is mixed. For example, while three-quarters are aware that bacterial infections can usually be cured with antibiotics, over half either incorrectly say that viral infections can be cured using antibiotics (27 percent) or that they do not know enough to say (28 percent). CONT.
Kaiser Family Foundation
