India, Pakistan, Bangladesh will see most deaths from antimicrobial resistance by 2050, a recent Lancet report revealed. The report forecasts a total 11.8 million fatalities from antibiotic resistant infections in South Asia which includes these three countries. The research conducted by the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Project is the first global analysis of antimicrobial resistance trends over time. In case the world fails to act, antibiotic resistant infections could be either a direct cause or a contributing factor in 8 million deaths a year by 2050. This is a chilling statistic and should alert us in Kashmir too, where people are not just known to consume antibiotics unnecessarily but also frequently without the doctors’ prescription.
According to studies, taking antibiotics when you don’t need them puts you and your family at risk of developing infections which in turn cannot be easily treated with antibiotics. It is this practice which promotes antibiotic resistance in a population. The US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that about one-third of antibiotic use in people is neither needed nor appropriate.
It is therefore important that people in Kashmir are made aware of the harmful health fallout of unneeded medication heavy on antibiotics. Also, it is not just people who are at fault, doctors are too. If we take the case of doctors, more often than not, they are guilty of overprescribing the drugs including antibiotics. This also contributes to antimicrobial resistance and going forward can become a factor in the rising deaths due to antibiotic resistant infections.
To prevent this state of affairs globally from becoming a deadly reality, the Lancet report has called for new strategies to decrease the risk of severe infections through vaccines, new drugs, improved healthcare, better access to existing antibiotics, and guidance on how to use them most effectively. We need the local government, especially the health department to implement this strategy in Jammu and Kashmir. We need not only create an awareness about the unnecessary use of antibiotics by people and their overprescription by the doctors but also have an institutional mechanism in place that discourages this practice. To start with, the government needs to ban buying medicines from pharmacies without prescriptions.
