Excessive use of the world’s most potent antibiotics has stoked drug-resistant infections in India for years. Now the country’s Covid-19 crisis has put the calamity into hyperdrive.
A first look at how many patients hospitalised during India’s first coronavirus wave also developed bacterial and fungal infections found that a small but alarming proportion harbour germs that resist multiple drugs.
Doctors battling to save lives amid a dearth of effective treatments are turning to the medicines they have on hand – often antibiotics that are not used in other countries for Covid-19. What’s more, the chaos of overrun hospitals means staff cannot always take precautions to ensure infections do not spread from one patient to the next.
The use of antibiotics – especially some that the World Health Organisation recommends reserving for the most difficult-to-treat cases – may be “adding fuel to the fire of the already alarming antimicrobial resistance levels”, Dr Kamini Walia, a microbiologist with the Indian Council of Medical Research, and colleagues said on Monday (Mar 24) in a study.
“Fear of missing a secondary infection and lack of specific therapy for Covid-19 leads to over-prescription of antibiotics.”
The research, published in the journal Infection and Drug Resistance, analysed data from 17,534 Covid patients admitted to one of 10 hospitals in the council’s surveillance network from June 1 to Aug 30, 2020.
