New Delhi: India is hosting a global summit on antibiotic resistance in the Capital this week. This comes post the NDM1 superbug controversy which had put the spotlight on hospital acquired infections. Hospital acquired infections are a dangerous trend that has doctors in India worried.
Dr Gaurav Gupta said, "We may treat the patient for the disease he has - but he may die of the infection he got inside the hospital."
Patients can get an infection from the wrong handling needles, gloves, saline and food.
Studies conducted across the country - from AIIMS in the Capital to hospitals in Chandigarh and Goa - show that 10-80 per cent of ICU patients end up getting hospital infections.
These infections are increasingly caused by superbugs like the MRSA and NDM, resistant even to most powerful antibiotics like the carbapenams, beyond which a doctor has little options to treat the patient with.
Public Health Foundation of India Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan said, "That's between the 1 and 10, an almost certain chance. Now roughly between the 30 and 60 per cent of those bacteria are drug resistant and many of them are highly drug resistant or multidrug resistant which means they don't respond to many antibiotics."
While safe medical practices inside an ICU are important, the real solution lies with the patient itself.
Remember every time there is an abuse of an antibiotic the bacteria gets a chance to grow stronger and resist the medicine, creating a drug resistant superbug in the first place. These superbugs then go on to infect the patients in the ICUs.
"We've only had antibiotics for the last 60 or 65 years and imagine a life without antibiotics because prior to antibiotics, if you had a simple bacterial infection, you could pray and if you are lucky you would have lived otherwise you would have died," said Laxminarayan.
As reported in: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/hospital-infections-have-indian-doctors-worried/189616-3.html