An official website of the United States government
QuickStats: Percentage* of Emergency Department Visits for Acute Viral Upper Respiratory Tract Infection† at Which an Antimicrobial Was Given or Prescribed,§ by Age — United States, 2010–2017¶
Weekly / February 14, 2020 / 69(6);174
* With 95% confidence intervals indicated with error bars.
† Acute viral upper respiratory tract infection defined as a visit with only one listed diagnosis including the following codes, that are generally viral in etiology, from the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9-CM), used during 2010–2015 or International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM), used during 2016–2017: ICD-9-CM 460, ICD-10-CM J00, ICD-9-CM 464.xx, ICD-10- CM J04 and J05, ICD-9-CM 465.xx, ICD-10 CM J06, or ICD-9-CM 786.2, ICD-10 CM R05.
§ Antimicrobial medications included drugs categorized as anti-infectives, derived from Level 1 therapeutic categories from Multum Lexicon Plus.
¶ Based on a sample of visits to emergency departments in noninstitutional general and short-stay hospitals, exclusive of federal, military, and Veterans Administration hospitals, located in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
From 2010–2013 to 2014–2017, the percentage of emergency department (ED) visits for acute viral upper respiratory tract infection that had an antimicrobial given or prescribed, hereafter referred to as ED visits, decreased from 23.4% to 17.6%. A decline was also seen for ED visits by children, decreasing from 17.9% to 10.1%, but a decline was not seen for ED visits by adults. In both periods, the percentage of ED visits by adults was higher than the percentage of ED visits by children.
Source: National Center for Health Statistics. National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, 2010–2017. ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/Datasets/NHAMCS.
Reported by: Jill J. Ashman, PhD, JAshman@cdc.gov, 301-458-4439; Loredana Santo, MD; Carol J. DeFrances, PhD.
Suggested citation for this article: QuickStats: Percentage of Emergency Department Visits for Acute Viral Upper Respiratory Tract Infection at Which an Antimicrobial Was Given or Prescribed, by Age — United States, 2010–2017. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2020;69:174. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6906a6.
MMWR and Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report are service marks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Use of trade names and commercial sources is for identification only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services.
References to non-CDC sites on the Internet are
provided as a service to MMWR readers and do not constitute or imply
endorsement of these organizations or their programs by CDC or the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. CDC is not responsible for the content
of pages found at these sites. URL addresses listed in MMWR were current as of
the date of publication.
All HTML versions of MMWR articles are generated from final proofs through an automated process. This conversion might result in character translation or format errors in the HTML version. Users are referred to the electronic PDF version (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr) and/or the original MMWR paper copy for printable versions of official text, figures, and tables.
Questions or messages regarding errors in formatting should be addressed to mmwrq@cdc.gov.