The study has suggested that if antibiotic resistance will continue to increase, it could mean heightened danger for the simplest of surgeries.
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Many surgical patients are given prophylactic antibiotics to reduce the risk of infection during surgeries, but a rise in antibiotic resistance in bacteria is putting those getting minor surgeries at increased risk.
It was estimated that almost half of post-surgery infections, and over a quarter of infections after chemotherapy are caused by bacteria that are already resistant to standard prophylactic antibiotics used in the USA.
In hospitals across the world, antibiotics are routinely given as a precautionary defensive measure to patients undergoing surgery and cancer treatment to prevent infection.
These had all looked antibiotic’s effectiveness at preventing infections common types of surgery and chemotherapy for blood cancers. About 27% of infections after blood cancer chemotherapy have been found resistant to standard antibiotics.
Antibiotics have saved millions of life all through the years, from the time it was discovered back in 1928, and by 1969 it has become very successful in fighting bacterial infections in the U.S. According to a new study, if the problem is not addressed soon, more people will die from common surgical procedures and cancer treatments.
This presents the need to acquire more data to establish new recommendations on antibiotic prophylaxis to combat the growing threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
The Consumers Union of the U.S. together with other organisations had concerns over the preventative use of antimicrobial drugs, as well as the concern that “the data reporting part of the bill does not require reporting of total quantity of antibiotics used”.
The widespread use of antibiotics has been in the news a lot the past few years, with the emergence of multidrug-resistant pathogens that weaken our fight against infectious disease. But, she says it doesn’t go far enough, since “the bill does not restrict the use of other non-medically important antibiotics or other drugs that may have an impact on human health and animal welfare”.
According to the study, bacteria’s resistance to antibiotics could threaten people who had surgery and chemotherapy. At a talk this month at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo in Nashville, Dr. Steve Solomon, former director of the CDC’s Office of Antimicrobial Resistance, called antibiotic resistance “a critical problem that we’ve been trying to solve for decades”.
Knowing this, hospitals across the country are adopting specialized teams in an effort to lower healthcare-associated infection rates as well as developing policies to be judicious with their antibiotic use.
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He said the best example of this was tuberculosis, which had been rife in the 1940s and 1950s, and was now re-emerging due to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. “It’s something that affects all of us”, Laxminarayan declared.
