June 13, 2023
One Health Trust’s Ramanan Laxminarayan, Thomas Van Boeckel, and Ruchita Balasubramanian co-authored a new study published in PLOS Medicine that used point prevalence surveys from 99 countries to determine trends in the global prevalence of hospital-associated drug-resistant infections (HARIs). Estimations revealed that the annual incidence of HARIs between 2010 and 2020 was 136 million globally. Middle-income countries have the largest burden of HARIs, consistent with previous literature demonstrating that countries in South and Southeast Asia experience the large majority of the disease burden associated with bacterial antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Factors including a lack of antimicrobial stewardship and a lack of accountability on the part of medical personnel, resulting in the overuse and misuse of antimicrobial drugs, combined with the often unrestricted access to antibiotics in middle-income countries could explain this trend. The study was limited by the absence of a global HARI surveillance network, which the researchers recommend as an crucial tool in quantifying the burden of HARIs in low-, middle-, and high-income countries, especially for infections caused by high priority pathogens.
Read the full article here.
