The Article in Brief

Availability of Antibiotics for Purchase Without a Prescription on the Internet

Arch G. Mainous III, and colleagues

Background Overuse of antibiotics has contributed to the spread of antibiotics resistance, an important clinical and public health issue. Most initiatives to address this problem focus on prescribing by clinicians. The purpose of this study was to examine the availability of antibiotics without a prescription on the Internet. The authors conducted a simple search with the keywords “purchase antibiotics without a prescription” and “online” on the Google and Yahoo search engines.

What This Study Found Antibiotics are freely available for purchase on the Internet without a prescription. Researchers found 138 unique vendors selling antibiotics without a prescription. Of those vendors, 36 percent sold antibiotics without a prescription and 64 percent provided an online prescription. Nearly all shipped to the United States with an average delivery time of 8 days. Vendors who sold antibiotics without a prescription were more likely to sell in quantities greater than a single course and more likely to take more than 7 days for the antibiotics to reach the customer than were vendors who required a medical interview, suggesting that these transactions would likely be used by individuals storing the drugs for future self-diagnosis and treatment.

Implications

• There is potentially a large pool of antibiotics in the US that is not affected by efforts to change doctors' prescribing habits. The ready availability of these antibiotics may be contributing to antibiotic resistance.
• The authors call for public health officials to expand their efforts to control antibiotic resistance to include education directed to patients and the community, as well as increased regulation and enforcement of existing regulations.