April 06, 2012
This morning, we revised a visualization on carbapenem sales in India and Pakistan, originally uploaded to our website a few weeks ago. The original graph mistakenly included penem (faropenem) sales along with carbapenems. Penems are a structurally related, but therapeutically distinct class of oral drugs that is not FDA-approved and is only available in some Asian countries (including China, India, and Japan). Because of the different clinical uses, formulation and market availability, the inclusion of faropenem biased comparisons, which is why we have updated the visualization on our website to include only carbapenem drugs.
The new graphic looks like this:
Excluding faropenem from the analysis tempers India s skyrocketing rate of retail sales of a last-resort class of antibiotics. Nevertheless, the prevailing point of the graphic still holds: India and Pakistan have seen a rapid rise in retail carbapenem sales in recent years, and this growth threatens to speed the development of carbapenem resistance.
One goal of the Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership (GARP) is to examine the drivers of antibiotic use and resistance in low- and middle-income settings and, through working groups in each GARP country, advance policies that expand access to antibiotics to those who are not currently reached while also promoting policies to encourage antibiotic stewardship. GARP is currently active in India (and South Africa, Kenya, and Vietnam, along with four additional countries soon to be announced), and we look forward to research collaborations which shed new light on antibiotic use trends, including the sharp increase in carbapenem sales seen in the graphic above.
For more information on carbapenems, check out the graphic in the Tools section of our website.
Image credit: iStock
