Antibiotics for common childhood infection now only 50% effective: Report

NEW DELHI: Antibiotics are no longer as effective as earlier it used to be on sepsis and meningitis in newborns.
According to recent research, the most commonly prescribed antibiotic in the treatment of sepsis and meningitis in newborns is just 50 % effective, reported NPR.
This new research was published in The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia last week and it is a serious issue as Sepsis kills 1 in 5 patients.
Meningitis is responsible for a quarter of a million deaths a year – half among children under the age of 5. Overall, childhood infections are responsible for over 550,000 deaths each year.
As per the research, the overuse of those drugs has led to the evolution of antimicrobial-resistant infections – bacteria and other diseases that are no longer knocked out by treatment.
Dr Phoebe Williams, a physician, and lecturer at the University of Sydney, Australia School of Medicine and lead author of the new research, said that the antimicrobial-resistant is the reason for the deaths of around 5 million children and adults, each year, according to NPR.
Roughly 1 million of those deaths each year occur in Southeast Asia.
The World Health Organisation has agreed that the death rate has dropped but he also said that the treatment is outdated.
He said that the infections still pose one of the greatest threats to newborns. And the rise of these antimicrobial-resistant infections is a major obstacle for the UN’s goal of ending all preventable neonatal deaths by 2030.
Williams’ research shows that in Southeast Asia these infections are increasingly antimicrobial resistant. “One of the units we work with in the Philippines, for example, their mortality rates in neonatal sepsis have gone from being about 20% ten years ago to 75% in the last 2 years,” Williams says.
It’s not just the Philippines. The new research shows that antimicrobial resistance is becoming a bigger problem “across low- and middle-income countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific,” according to Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar at Princeton University who wasn’t involved in the new research.
One class of drug that Williams’ research has shown to be still effective and that is approved for children is carbapenems, a collection of powerful antibiotics containing many different drugs that IV gives and often used as a last resort for treating bad infections. Carbapenems typically aren’t prescribed unless necessary because they’re expensive, the IV is an invasive element and they’re not widely available in every country.
“They’re not in the WHO guidelines,” Williams says, but “we know many clinicians globally are now going to them as a first-line agent.”