INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
America and Australia will die from superbug infections unless countries prioritise fighting the growing threat posed by bacteria immune to
consequences" for public healthcare and spending unless basic hospital hygiene is boosted and unnecessary antibiotic use
public health at the OECD, told AFP that countries were already spending an average of 10 percent of their healthcare budgets on treating
antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) bugs."AMR costs more than the flu, more than HIV, more than tuberculosis
consume ever more antibiotics -- either through prescriptions or agriculture and livestock products given medicines to stave off infection
-- strains of bacteria are developing that resist the effects of drugs designed to kill them.In low and middle-income countries, resistance
is already high: in Indonesia Brazil and Russia up to 60 percent of bacterial infections are already resistant to at least one
resistance rates in health care systems, which are already weakened by constrained budgets, will create the conditions for an enormous death
toll that will be mainly borne by new-borns, very young children and the elderly," the report said."Even small cuts in the kitchen, minor
to so-called 2nd- and 3rd-line antibiotics -- break-glass-in-case-of-emergency infection treatments -- will balloon by 70 percent by
2030."These are antibiotics that as far as possible we don't want to use because we want these as back up," Cecchini said."Essentially, we
are using more when we should use less and we are running out of our best options in case of emergency."How to avoid disasterThe group,
which advises the World Health Organization on public health initiatives, said the only way to avert disaster was to implement immediate,
and clinics by insisting all staff wash their hands and conform to stricter safety regimes.It also suggested resistance could be fought with
a result in a matter of minutes, and Cecchini also put forward the idea of "delayed prescriptions" to dent antibiotic overuse by making
changes would cost as little as $2 (1.7 euros) per person per year and would save millions of lives and billions of dollars by
mid-century."They would decrease burden of AMR in these countries by 75 percent," said Cecchini
TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
