Important ICMR study is a clarion call to save the medicines that protect us
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A 20-hospital, 3-year ICMR study of over 150,000 patients finds that carbapenem drug-resistant infections are driving up both deaths and treatment costs
A large multi-centre study of over 150,000 patients in India's 20 tertiary-care hospitals has put a stark number on one of the top ten global health threats today: Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). AMR happens when infections easier to treat earlier become difficult (or impossible) to treat due to disease-causing microbe (such as bacteria, virus, fungi, parasite) becoming drug resistant.
The findings offer one of the clearest multi-centre pictures yet of the clinical and economic burden when common Gram-negative bacteria become resistant to carbapenem antibiotics.
And the message is blunt: AMR is not simply making infections harder to treat. It is translating into more deaths and substantially higher treatment costs.
Researchers compared outcomes among patients infected with four major Gram-negative pathogens - Escherichia coli (E. coli), Klebsiella pneumoniae (K. pneumoniae), Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) - looking specifically at infections that were drug-resistant or susceptible to carbapenem antibiotics. Carbapenem antibiotics are a powerful group of broad-spectrum antibiotics, upon which clinicians have traditionally relied on when infections caused by Gram-negative bacteria become resistant to other drugs. Resistance to these medicines therefore leaves doctors with fewer therapeutic options.
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