ICMR worried over rising resistance to last-resort antibiotics in India

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

ICMR) has found that the resistance to last-resort antibiotics is rising in India, ToI reported on September 24.

ICMR has found the abuse of antimicrobials (antibiotics, antivirals or antifungals) to be the reason for this, which is says has led to widespread resistance among people.

Enhance Your Healthcare Expertise with High-Impact Courses

The study was based on data from 21 tertiary-level hospitals across India.

For example, carbapenem, an antibiotic that effectively treated pneumonia and septicemia until a decade ago, may not help Indian patients anymore. According to the report, if eight out of 10 patients with a drug-resistant E-coli infection responded to carbapenem in 2017, only six responded in 2022.

In the study, around 1 lakh culture isolates from ICU patients were studied to analyse hospital-acquired infections. It found 1,747 pathogens, bacterium Ecoli being the most common culprit.

It’s worse with infections caused by drug-resistant avatars of bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae: as against six out of 10 finding the medicine helpful, only four could be helped by it in 2022.

“Even if the new antibiotics for E-coli developed in the West come to India right now, they may not work against a few drug-resistant Indian E-coli strains,” said senior ICM scientist Dr Kamini Walia, one of the main authors of the study.

Dr Walia, however, added that the 2022 report had some heartening findings amidst widespread antimicrobial resistance in India: “We are happy to say that resistance patterns of major super bugs haven’t changed over the last five to six years, but the