Ooops, I did it again! Medical errors have just become a global crisis

Sometimes you have to take a prescription drug—but be careful when you do. Aside from the risk of suffering an adverse reaction or side-effect, which happens on average to 10 percent of people taking a drug, the chances that there’s been an error in the prescription is also very high.

Around 20 percent of all prescriptions contain an error—from the wrong dose to the wrong drug—and these mistakes could be killing up to 22,000 Britons every year. A similar rate of error, and death, is happening in every country around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.

Discovering the rate of prescription errors is difficult—often because it’s hard to track, since most prescriptions are handed