E-Paper
India witnessed increase in antibiotic misuse during Covid 1st wave: Study
Additional 216.4 million doses of antibiotics were sold in India between June 2020 and September 2020 during the peak of the Covid 1st wave.
From June 2020 to September 2020, when the first wave of the pandemic was raging in India, the sales of antibiotics soared and accounted for an additional 216.4 million doses of antibiotics sales, a study conducted by the researchers at Washington University has revealed. Researchers have linked this increase with the pandemic and termed this as 'antibiotic misuse'.
Antibiotics are not at all effective for a viral infection like that of Covid-19 as they are only meant to fight bacterial infection, but such antibiotic misuse can actually increase the risk for drug-resistant infections, researchers have said.
In the same period of time, 38 million more doses of azithromycin, sometimes prescribed for throat, nose infections, were sold in India, the study revealed.
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The study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, analysed monthly sales of all antibiotics in India's private health sector from January 2018 through December 2020. The data came from an Indian branch of IQVIA, a US-based health information technology company, news agency PTI reported.
What is antibiotic misuse?
Antibiotic misuse/overuse is the administration of antibiotics when they are not needed. This makes bacteria harder to treat. "Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to global public health," said the study's senior author, Sumanth Gandra, an associate hospital epidemiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in the US.
"Overuse of antibiotics lessens their ability to effectively treat minor injuries and common infections such as pneumonia, which means that these conditions can become serious and deadly," Gandra said, as quoted by PTI.
What has the study revealed?
According to the study, a total of 16.29 billion doses of antibiotics were sold in India in 2020, which is slightly less than the amounts sold in 2018 and in 2019. But when researchers focused on adult doses, usage increased from 72.6 per cent in 2018 and 72.5 per cent in 2019 to 76.8 per cent in 2020.
The sales of azithromycin for adults in India increased from 4 per cent in 2018 and 4.5 per cent in 2019 to 5.9 per cent in 2020. Apart from azithromycin, the sales of doxycycline and faropenem, two antibiotics commonly used to treat respiratory infections, went up.
The researchers noted that India also had restrictions and experienced dramatic decreases in malaria, dengue, chikungunya and other infections typically treated with antibiotics, which should have decreased the use of antibiotics.
(With PTI inputs)
