For more than a decade, I have seen the impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on people, particularly newborns, at first hand. Bangladesh Shishu Hospital and Institute in Dhaka - one of the collaborating organizations of the Child Health Research Foundation, where I work - is the country's largest children's hospital. Here, six out of every ten babies with infections caused by multidrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria die, often just a few days after being infected.
In Bangladesh, a major difficulty in the fight against AMR is the lack of data on which bacteria are infecting whom, on how the various strains respond (or not) to which antibiotics and on how decisions are made about which drugs to use.
Bangladesh's health-care system is unusual in that most people receive treatment in community clinics, diagnostic centres and pharmacies rather than in hospitals. People tend to go to hospitals only when treatment obtained from these other places fails.
Thanks to biases in the available data, many people think, for instance, that resistance is ubiquitous. Physicians often give patients late-generation or last-resort antibiotics even though early-generation drugs could still work.
#antimicrobial-resistance #global-health #healthcare-systems #low-income-countries #un-general-assembly
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