COVER STORY/ANTIBIOTIC

vaccine, MenAfriVac, the National Centre for Disease Control's (NCDC) report in December 2019 shows about 2,770 suspected cases. Garba Iliyasu, an infection disease expert at the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital and a Lecturer at the Department of Medicine, College of Health Sciences, Bayero University Kano says that the major challenge with meningitis is the increasing resistance to penicillin.

in India too. Recently, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) published the annual report of the Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network for January-December 2018. In the study, ICMR tested samples from 20 top medical institutes from across the country. From these centres, ICMR collected 60,497 isolates in 2018 to check susceptibility of several antibiotics to different bacteria groups like Enterobacteriaceae, typhoidal non-fermenting gram negative bacteria, diarrheal pathogens, Staphylococci and Enterococci and fungal pathogens.

The findings were again shocking. Take the case of Enterobacteriaceae. Only half (52 per cent) of the isolates were susceptible to piperacillin-tazobactam. As per the findings, maximum susceptibility was shown against colistin (92 per cent) followed by amikacin (68 per cent) and carbapenems (60-65 per cent).

Antibiotic resistance is making treatment of infectious diseases like leprosy almost impossible in India. This, when India had pledged to eradicate leprosy by 2019. Since 2014, India is a part of a growing list of countries, including Brazil and China, where leprosy can no longer be treated by the conventional multidrug treatment (MDT). What’s worrying is that new patients are now showing resistance to MDT, whereas drug resistance was earlier experienced mostly by those who discontinued treatment. More than 13 per cent of the new cases and 44 per cent of the relapsed cases are showing resistance to rifampicin, one of the three drugs of MDT, say researchers with Stanley Browne Laboratory in Delhi, a WHO centre for surveillance of drug resistance in leprosy. The study was published in

in November 2015. “Rising cases of drug resistance since 2014, particularly among new patients, shows that resistant strains are actively circulating in India,” says Mallika Lavania, a researcher with Stanley Browne Laboratory. So how are countries trying to combat resistance that seems to be a disruptive development for public health?

companies have abandoned R&D in antibiotics. The

of the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that there are only a few innovative antibiotics in developmental stages.

As the world wakes up to the fact that failure to control AMR could lead to economic losses equivalent to US $100 trillion by 2050, action against antibiotic resistance is mounting both at the local and global levels. From finding new treatments to ensure existing drugs are used judiciously to reduce the inappropriate use of antibiotics, it is a multidimensional battle in which each of us has a role to play.