Health experts and doctors have called for intensive surveillance to draw an estimate of the number of people in Telangana who have developed resistance to antibiotics, medicines which have become redundant and need not be procured by the government, and other advantages.
President of Infection Control Academy of India, Ranga Reddy Burri said surveillance or research to understand the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) level in the State will help figure out four things — microbes prevalent in a patient group or locality; the antibiotics that can be discarded; which antibiotics have to be kept in reserve, and define the medicine purchasing policy.
Head of Critical Care Division at Continental Hospitals, Palepu Gopal said antibiotics are divided into three categories — regular, higher end and reserved.
“The antibiotics in the reserve category have to be regulated, which is not done currently. In the United Kingdom, prescriptions containing reserve antibiotics have to go through infection control committees,” he explained.
Dr Ranga Reddy said our arsenal of antibiotics is limited and only a few more candidates are in the industry pipeline.
Protecting drugs
“It takes 10-15 years for a drug to clear all phases of clinical trials. Huge amounts of money are not invested in developing these medicines, unlike the funding available to develop cancer drugs, for instance. The reason is that the return of investment is low as the new drug will not be sold much if microbes become resistant to it. So we have to protect the existing line of antibiotics,” he said.
