“This is the first time we have national estimates for what is going on in hospitals”, study co-author Dr. Arjun Srinivasan told Time of his work tracking antibiotic use in more than 300 facilities across the country.
Advertisement
Antibiotic use guidelines are already in place and don’t need to be changed, he said.
The report was published online September 19 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
More than 34 million patients were discharged from these hospitals over the six-year period.
“What we’re proposing is that the strategies to address this should come from a psychological perspective”, and should target doctors who give out the most antibiotics, he said. Antibiotics are also fed, by the ton, to livestock in order to help them grow more quickly. What lies ahead?While the approaching resolution on September 21 confirms that the worldwide community is aware of the need to address antibiotic resistance, there are growing concerns about what lies ahead, which may not be so easy to scrub off.”We must understand that microbes will always be able to evolve resistance to whatever we throw at them”.
One reason for overprescribing is that it’s easy to do and many doctors figure it might not help, but it won’t hurt, Mehrotra suggested.
Meanwhile, the use of fluoroquinolones, a very commonly prescribed class of antibiotics that isn’t almost as strong as carbapenems or vancomycin-dropped by 20 percent. They asked the companies to phase out the routine use of medically important antibiotics in their meat and poultry supply chains.
Researchers have found that as people are given antibiotics at higher rates, bacteria can become more resistant to the drugs.
Before the United Nations gathering, Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the nonprofit Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy, is scheduled to hold a meeting of health experts to focus attention on the problem. However, new developments in the field of antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance, both in basic research and in institutional settings, raise red flags about a seemingly “clean” society.
“In fact, we now have many multidrug-resistant infections that are not treatable with any antibiotics we have, and consequently there is now a call for global action to solve the problem”, Laxminarayan said.
“In developed nations, too many people are being prescribed antibiotics unnecessarily, while in many developing countries too few have access to these lifesaving drugs”, he said. Over time, more and more antibiotics have been worn out in this fashion, and the world could now face a future where diseases that were once easily treated are now serious, expensive and sometimes deadly problems.
Advertisement
Lord Jim O’Neill, Chairman of the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, said about today’s World Bank Group report: “This report provides another timely reminder that rising drug resistance is a looming threat to our prosperity and sustained economic development in all parts of the world”. Ironically, numerous same companies fuelling resistance by failing to protect their supply chains are demanding investment from governments to develop new antibiotics to fight resistance. Prescriptions of the extremely powerful antibiotic vancomycin-one of the only drugs effective against the scary skin infection, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)-increased by 27 percent.
