December 20, 2023
An article published in Nature sheds light on what India is doing to mitigate the spread of antimicrobial resistance — which has emerged as a major public health threat due to the country’s poorly regulated pharmaceutical industry and a public–private divide in healthcare that has not only contributed to the excessive use of antibiotics but has also made these drugs inaccessible to a large section of society.
“There’s so much competition in the antibiotics space that there’s aggressive pressure to sell antibiotics…The incentives there are to hugely oversell antibiotics, and not any antibiotic — it’s to oversell the newest antibiotics — which really shouldn’t be given to people just willy-nilly, but that’s what’s happening,” says OHT’s Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan.
Find the article here.
