Jiwan Kshetry
It is not only the doctors; from the people buying and taking antibiotics on their own and rural health workers using the 'wonder drug' to cure the patients at the earliest, to regulatory bodies doing everything but their job, everybody is to blame for a mess that is likely to threaten the health of, don't gasp, people across the world.
I, along with a number of people with a deeper understanding of the problem of anti-microbial resistance (AMR), doubt even a number of measures outlined here will substantially help the region and the world to prolong the antibiotic era. But if nothing is done, we may be already approaching the threshold to post-antibiotic era, with South Asia regrettably leading the world's march to abyss.
Less than nine decades from discovery of penicillin—the first antibiotic to be recognized and used as such—there are dire but credible warnings about the onset of a post-antibiotic era. For a health system dependent on the use of antimicrobials in an increasingly critical and diverse ways, the likelihood of extensive resistance of microbes to these magic drugs is the ultimate nightmare.
When the worst fears of people closely watching the resistance patterns of microbes come to be unavoidable realities, a patient with a modest open wound may stare at death and an oncologist will counsel a cancer patient awaiting chemotherapy and organ transplantation like this: there is a very real risk of untreatable infections during the treatment and that is often uniformly fatal, though the scenario was much more different two decades ago or so.
For those still skeptical about the seriousness of the problem, this is how the latest report by WHO titled 'Antimicrobial resistance: Global report on surveillance' opens: "A post-antibiotic era—in which common infections and minor injuries can kill—far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st century."
