A record number of countries are now monitoring and reporting on antibiotic resistance – marking a major step forward in the global fight against drug resistance. But the data they provide reveals that a worrying number of bacterial infections are increasingly resistant to the medicines at hand to treat them.
Since the WHO’s Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS) report in 2018, participation has grown exponentially. In only three years of existence, the system now aggregates data from more than 64 000 surveillance sites with more than 2 million patients enrolled from 66 countries across the world. In 2018 the number of surveillance sites was 729 across 22 countries.
More countries are also reporting on the recently approved indicator on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as part of the Sustainable Development Goal monitoring. “The enormous expansion of countries, facilities and patients covered by the new AMR surveillance system allows us to better document the emerging public health threat of AMR,” said Hanan Balkhy, Assistant Director-General for antimicrobial resistance at WHO .
High rates of resistance among antimicrobials frequently used to treat common infections, such as urinary tract infections or some forms of diarrhoea, indicate that the world is running out of effective ways to tackle these diseases. For instance, the rate of resistance to ciprofloxacin, an antimicrobial frequently used to treat urinary tract infections, varied from 8.4% to 92.9% in 33 reporting countries.
WHO is concerned that the trend will further be fueled by the inappropriate use of antibiotics during the COVID-19 pandemic...
Full text at GMPnews.Net