A Method for Detecting Injury of People's Health from Prescriptions at a Pharmacy

A method is proposed to detect the abnormal situations of people's health in case of the unexpected outbreak of a disease by monitoring the daily variations in the prescriptions at a pharmacy. The abnormal situations are defined as the situations which are not included in the majority (99.9%) of the normal situations. An epidemic probably caused by infectious micro-organisms in a terrorist attack is taken as an example. The drugs for the typical symptoms are monitored: influenza anti-viral agent and common cold drug. This paper demonstrates that the border between the normal and abnormal situations corresponds to the detection limit which is a fundamental concept in analytical chemistry.