“The reality is we’re giving out a lot of antibiotics when we don’t need to.”
36.6 percent of Australians got at least one government-subsidised antimicrobial prescription in 2022, up from 32.9 percent the year before. Hospital use runs nearly three times that of the Netherlands. Taxpayers fund the prescriptions and then fund the superbugs. Drug-resistant infections already kill hundreds of Australians a year.