News Highlights:
- As the current G-20 president and a vulnerable country, India has a crucial role in ensuring that Antimicrobial Resistance(AMR) remains high on the global health agenda.
- In the past few years, alarmingly high resistance rates in pathogens of public health importance have been reported from Indian hospitals.
Antimicrobial Resistance(AMR)
- About
- Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites change over time and no longer respond to medicines making infections more complicated to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness and death.
- AMR alone kills more people than cancer and road traffic accidents combined.
- The World Health Organisation (WHO) has identified AMR as one of the top ten threats to global health.
- Causes of Antimicrobial Resistance:
- Uneven and unregulated antibiotic usage is one of the most important reasons behind the AMR crisis
- Prescription of antibiotics for the most basic maladies like the common cold enhances antimicrobial Resistance.
- Inequalities in access to medicine, excessive use, and poor sanitation services complicate the problem.
- Farmers use antibiotics to speed the growth of chickens and other livestock, and drug-resistant germs find new ways to enter the environment.
- Prevention:
- Guidelines on how each class of medications should be used to treat 21 of the most prevalent infections have been published by the World Health Organization (WHO).
- Governments, Medical Associations must also commit to tackling the antibiotic crisis together.
- Indian medical societies adopted the Chennai Declaration to encourage action against stewardship.
- Reduce unnecessary antibiotic use by people and in agriculture.
- Antibiotics should never be used as unnecessary growth promoters in livestock farming.
- Prevent infections from happening in the first place with better hygiene, access to clean water, infection control in healthcare facilities, and vaccination.
- Steps have been proposed to speed up the adoption of state-of-the-art diagnostics in hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and homes to reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics.
- Pharmaceutical companies and government agencies are gaining a better understanding of the role that vaccines and alternative therapies could play in reducing antimicrobial resistance.
Antimicrobial Resistance in India:
- Overview:
- India is among the nations with the highest burden of bacterial infections.
- An estimated 4,10,000 children aged five or less die from pneumonia in India annually, with pneumonia accounting for almost 25 % of all child deaths.
- The crude mortality from infectious diseases in India today is 417 per 1,00,000 persons.
- In India, over 56,000 newborns die each year due to sepsis caused by organisms resistant to first-line antibiotics.
- The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) banned antibiotics and several pharmacologically active substances in fisheries.
- There is no regulation in the poultry industry where many commercially available pre-mixed feeds come with added antibiotics.
Government Initiatives to Prevent AMR:
- National Action Plan on AMR:
- India released the AMR action plan in 2017, 2 years after WHO released the Global Action Plan. Only two states, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh have State Action Plans.
- The goal is to combat antimicrobial resistance in India effectively.
- The National Action Plan on AMR focuses on the One Health approach to involve various stakeholder ministries/departments.
- AMR Surveillance and Research Network (AMRSN):
- The main goals of ICMR AMRSN are to establish a network of hospitals to monitor trends in the antimicrobial susceptibility profile of clinically important bacteria and fungi limited to human health.
- AMRSN delivers the accurate estimation of drug-resistant infections and patterns of AMR among pathogens of human importance across Indian hospitals.
Conclusion:
- Addressing AMR requires a multipronged and multisectoral approach. The urgency to develop new drugs should not discourage us from instituting measures to use the existing antimicrobials judiciously.
- Improved infection control in communities and hospitals, availability and utilisation of quality diagnostics and laboratories and educating people about antimicrobials have proved effective in reducing antimicrobial pressure
- Effective microbiological surveillance of the agriculture and livestock industry and pharmaceutical manufacturing plants would allow for informed policy actions to mitigate AMR.
Pic Courtesy: The Hindu
Content Source: The Hindu