Antibiotic resistance is a public health threat, doctors said at a convention on Saturday.
It is apprehended that the world will soon reach a pre-antibiotic era where a simple bacterial infection can lead to severe illness.
Indiscriminate consumption of antibiotics as well as the use of antibiotics in poultry and agriculture are the routes via which antibiotics enter the human body.
A bacteria present in the human body is getting exposed to the antibiotic and developing an immunity against the drug, said an infectious diseases specialist.
When the same antibiotic or one of that group is administered during a severe infection at a later stage, it is failing to act making the infection very difficult to manage.
The problem should be seen as a multisectoral one and not merely a problem caused by unnecessary use of the drug.
“Not many antibiotics are left against which resistance has not grown. India is almost the epicentre of antibiotic resistance,” said S.K. Todi, director of critical care medicine at AMRI Hospitals, Dhakuria, and the co-chairperson of the scientific committee of Saturday’s conference organised by the Indian Society of Critical Care Medicine.
“A large number of infections are viral infections and there is no need to take antibiotics,” Todi told a news conference that followed.
The website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, says that “antimicrobial resistance happens when germs like bacteria and fungi develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them”. It adds: “That means the germs are not killed and continue to grow. Resistant infections can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to treat.”
Subramanian Swaminathan, an infectious diseases specialist at Gleneagles Hospital, Chennai, said that doctors were coming across more cases where it was becoming difficult to treat infections because the patients had become resistant to many antibiotics.
“There are multiple stakeholders in this fight against antibiotic resistance. This includes the government, doctors, pharmacies and patients,” he added.
The doctors stressed the need to go into greater detail while examining a patient.
More clinical examination of a patient, going into the history of the illness can help doctors avoid the use of unnecessary antibiotics, they said.
Even patients are to blame.
Some of the doctors said that patients often expressed displeasure if a doctor did not prescribe an antibiotic.
Chandramouli Bhattacharya, an infectious diseases specialist at Peerless Hospital, who was not present at the conference, told The Telegraph later that easy access to antibiotics was a big problem.
“Unlike in the west, one can very easily buy antibiotics from a retail medicine store in our country,” he said.
Humans have bacteria present inside their bodies, but they may not be able to infect a person always for reasons like the person’s immunity. The same bacteria may go on to infect a person later, either because it gained more power or the person’s immunity became weakened.
“If unnecessary antibiotics are consumed, the bacteria will identify the antibiotic at one point and be able to resist it,” said Bhattacharya.
“The situation is becoming such that we are going back to a pre-antibiotic era when simple bacterial infections can lead to severity of the illness,” he said.