'SA antibiotic use up 60% in 10 years'
|Published
Cape Town - Researchers have called for a conservative use of antibiotics following a new world report that shows a decline in effectiveness of the once powerful and life-saving drugs.
In the State of the World’s Antibiotics 2015 report released on Thursday, researchers from the US-based Centre for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP) warn that once-treatable infections are becoming difficult to cure due to an overuse of antibiotics.
According to the report – which looked comprehensively at the state of global antibiotic use and drug resistance in humans, livestock and the environment between 2000 and 2010 – antibiotic consumption grew by more than 30 percent in about 70 countries that were surveyed. The greatest increase was seen in middle and lower income countries, mostly Brics nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
This is the first time the report included data from South Africa.
The report showed that in about 50 percent of cases antibiotics were used inappropriately to treat minor infections such as coughs and colds.
Hospitals were said to have generated some of the most dangerous and difficult to treat infections as a result of the heavy use of antibiotics. In some of the poorer nations, antibiotics were sometimes used as a substitute for infection control.
According to the report, antibiotic use in South Africa increased by over 60 percent over the last decade – a situation which has been described by some researchers as a crisis.
Antibiotic resistance has been declared a public health crisis by the World Health Organisation as these medicines, once known as miracle drugs when they were first introduced in the 1940s, are becoming increasingly ineffective.
Rising incomes which increased access to antibiotics were blamed for overuse of these drugs while increased demand for animal protein was also responsible for the rising use of antimicrobial drugs on livestock production – again driving resistance.
Professor Marc Mendelson, head of infectious disease at Groote Schuur Hospital and UCT, said while antibiotics were meant to be lifesaving drugs, over-prescription and excessive use over a number of years meant the drugs now could have the opposite effect. “There is no doubt that antibiotic resistance is a public health crisis. Increasingly we may be losing all our antibiotics against certain infections. The bottom line is that the more overuse there is the more the resistance occurs.”
He said to reverse the crisis the country needed to use antibiotics more conservatively and adopt other interventions such as improving sanitation and immunisation, and “encouraging antibiotic stewardship”.
Dr Kim Faure, South Africa’s co-ordinator CDDEP, said while antibiotic consumption in the country was worrying, the good news was when compared to other developing countries that sold antibiotics over the counter, South Africa still had stringent policies that made it impossible to access these drugs without prescription.
sipokazi.fokazi@inl.co.za
Cape Argus