Thaindian News

New Delhi, April 6 (IANS) As the World Health Day is being observed Thursday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) called for attention towards growing drug resistance in microbes due to wrong and irregular use of antibiotics.

“In WHO’s Southeast Asia Region, inadequate quality, misuse and poor access to drugs continue to be major components of the widespread inappropriate use of antibiotics,” a statement from WHO said Wednesday.

“The time for sustained action is now, since we are slowly but surely moving towards a reversion to the dreadful pre-antibiotic era,” said Samlee Plianbangchang, WHO’s regional director for Southeast Asia.

“If that happens, death and disease due to untreatable infectious diseases will become the biggest obstacle to poverty alleviation, development, and global efforts to make the world a better and more healthy place.”

Multidrug-resistant microbes are disease causing micro organisms which become resistant to medicines due to getting exposed to it in lesser quantity. This happens when antibiotics are taken on irregular intervals, and the dose is not completed, exposing them to smaller quantity than required to kill them.

“A multi-drug resistant microbe is one which does not respond to various medicines,” says S.C. Gera, senior consultant internal medicines at Delhi’s Fortis hospital.

“We are regularly seeing such patients who do not respond to antibiotic drugs, these are cases of multi-drug resistance,” he says.

Giving the reason for development of such microbes, Gera says fault lies with both doctors and patients.

“At times, doctors don’t diagnose the case properly so the antibiotic given does not work. Then the drug is changed many times and it leads to development of antibiotic resistance. Similarly, patients do not take the complete dose of medicine, or they take lesser doses a day than prescribed, leading to the microbes developing drug resistance,” Gera says.

According to WHO, these drug-resistant microbes will have huge implication of economic health as well if the trend is not captured in time.

“When infections become resistant to first-line antibiotics, treatment is shift to second and third-line drugs which are much more expensive and sometimes more toxic as well. The drugs needed to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are over 100 times more expensive than the first-line drugs,” WHO said.

“In some countries, the high cost is prohibitive with the result that some of these cases can no longer be treated. Similarly, the emergence of resistance in HIV to currently effective drugs could destroy the hopes of survival for millions of people living with HIV,” the statement added.

WHO also called upon states in South Asia to establish monitoring mechanisms to tackle the challenge.

“Discovery, development and distribution of new antibiotics is a long, drawn out and expensive process. After investing millions of dollars and years of research, when a new antibiotic becomes available, its misuse renders it ineffective in a very short time,” the statement added.