Often times, you see people keeping different kinds of assorted antibiotics in their drug box or pouch and you wonder whether they do medicine business or why they are stocking the drugs. The response you will get, most often, is that the drugs are essentials in the home to fight infections. These drugs are usually not prescribed but kept in the house by people out of the erroneous beliefs that they are active drugs against infections.
But medical experts have warned that antibiotics abusers are vulnerable to death. Indiscriminate use of the drugs causes diseases causing bacterial and diseases causing virus to develop resistance to the drugs and thereby making treatment and recovery very prolong, and in many cases very impossible. When it becomes impossible the infections ultimately kill the patient.
In the medical report’s history of antibiotics, experts say that the trajectory of antibiotics today is directly opposite to what it was nearly 90 years ago when Alexander Fleming’s, a professor of bacteriology, efforts led to the manufacturing of pure penicillin, a lifesaving wonder drug, on a commercial level.
The challenge back in the years was how to increase supply and how to manufacture the medicine on a large scale while initiating demand: helping the drug enter routine use in hospitals around the world so that its remarkable benefits could be realized by all.
Today, the report said, we face a very different set of supply and demand problems; in fact, just the opposite of where we started. With dozens of antibiotics now readily available and routinely accessed by virtually everybody thereby resulting to too much demand.
Around the globe, people are consuming antibiotics in ever-greater quantities, often in unnecessary ways. That, unfortunately, is speeding up the pace at which bacteria develop resistance to the antibiotics used to treat them, and progressively undermining the effectiveness of the drugs.
Antimicrobial use in the agricultural sector deepens this challenge leading to the emergence of these drug-resistant bacteria.
But on the supply side, we face the problem of too few companies developing new drugs to replace those that we are losing to rising resistance.
This is the global trajectory of antibiotics today; assorted, easy- to-get, cheap, unregulated and indiscriminate use, drug resistance, and infections difficult to manage. And it is a very serious health issue with global threat.
Data from WHO
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), resistance to antibiotics and other types of antimicrobials is growing and represents the single greatest challenge in infectious diseases today. The WHO reported nearly half a million new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis across 100 countries in 2013, amounting to more than 20 percent of previously treatable tuberculosis cases now being resistant to multiple drugs. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that each year, at least 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, and at least 23,000 of them die. This inflicts a direct cost of $20 billion on the U.S. health care system.
In the agricultural sector, U.S. Food and Drug Administration sales data showed that drug makers sold more than 20 million pounds of medically important antibiotics for use in food-producing animals in 2014—23 percent more than in 2009—the most ever reported and more than twice the amount of antibiotics sold to treat people.
According to WHO, drug resistant is a global health crisis that knows no borders. Left unchecked, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) will touch all people, regardless of their nationality or their country’s level of development. It will dangerously undermine health care as we know it, making common procedures such as cancer chemotherapy or cesarean section births—which depend on effective antibiotics to reduce their risks—far more dangerous than they are today. Indeed, by 2050, 10 million people a year could be dying as a result of AMR, up from around 700,000 today, with China and India each being home to about 1 million affected patients. And by then, an estimated $100 trillion in global GDP will have been lost.
Just as infections travel with the people who carry them, so does resistance, so solving AMR is a shared responsibility. AMR is one of the biggest health threats facing the world, but it is not beyond the world’s ability to meet and conquer it, both economically and scientifically. The global community must act together, and quickly, to address the problem.
“Indeed, by 2050, 10 million people a year could be dying as a result of AMR, up from around 700,000 today, with China and India each being home to about 1 million affected patients. And by then, an estimated $100 trillion in global GDP will have been lost.”
It is against these backdrops that Citizen Comfort contacted one of our ever-dependable resource persons, Dr Emmanuel Abodunwa of FMC Lokoja, to x-ray issues and developments in the use of antibiotics for every citizen. His report is herein published for your benefits
Dare Agbeluyi, Chief Publisher, Citizen comfort
Antimicrobial
Antimicrobial is the general name for any substance that kills microorganism or inhibits their growth and multiplication (replication). They include antibiotics, antifungal and antiviral. The substance attacks bacteria, fungi and viruses respectively. Antiseptics are also included. Antiseptics are used to sterilize surfaces of a living tissue i.e making them clear of microorganisms especially during surgery.
Our focus in this article will be on antibiotics. Even though abuse of almost any class of drugs happen, the trend of antibiotics abuse is more and the effect is widely seen in our society. Antibiotics are substances that inhibit the growth and replication of bacteria or kill it outrightly. They have been in existence for ages. Ancient Egyptians applied mouldy bread to infected wounds. Work of scientists in the 19th century brought about great success in the history and use of antibiotics. The word antibiotic was first used around this period. Scientists such as Alexander Fleming, Paul Ehrlich and Selman Waksman did a lot of work to make antibiotics generally available.
Advantages/Uses/Benifits
- Diseases such as diarrhea, pneumonia were the leading causes of death before the advent of antibiotics. Nowadays, they can be treated or managed effectively with the use of antibiotics
- Minor surgical procedures posed great risk because of infection but this is not so anymore as these minor surgeries can be done under antibiotics cover.
- Major surgeries that could not be attempted for the risk of being unsuccessful can now be attempted and done successfully
Challenges with Antibiotics Use
These challenges are in line with the general challenges faced with all drugs
- Self- medication/self -dosing: most people pick up antibiotics just because they saw someone using it or grew up using it and many other reasons. Such drugs are used without prescription and direction of use(dosage and timing)
- Under/overdosing: most people that self- prescribed medication often listen to advice from friends or relatives and most times, they either underdose or overdose on this particular drug
- Incomplete use: most people including those that got prescription from an approved source, usually stop using the medication once they feel better or when the infection is visibly gone. They do not complete the dose over the prescribed duration
- Mixed dosing: some people pick up just any other available or similar antibiotics to complete other antibiotics that have been prescribed to them.
Effects
- Drug resistance: this is one major effect of antibiotics abuse. It is basically the reduction of the effectiveness of a medication in treating a condition. Resistance might be as a result of factors that have been listed above
- Multi drug resistance: this is when an organism is resistant to different antibiotics at once. This example was seen in the management of tuberculosis at some point.
- Increased cost of treatment: when there is drug resistance, treatment of certain conditions become more expensive as higher and more potent antibiotics are needed.
- Increased length of management/hospital stay
- Complications arise from prolonged infection. Some patients end up losing their lives.
Prevention
Health education on risk of drug abuse:
- generally highlight the effect of drug abuse to the people.
- encourage them to avoid taking unprescribed medication.
- take the right doses of drugs for the number of days prescribed.
- Do not discontinue medication even after feeling well.
- Encourage patients to get their drugs from accredited pharmacies only.
- Access to drugs should be controlled to avoid abuse. This can be achieved if most of these drugs are made available only on prescriptions
- Reduce demand for antibiotics by maintaining good oral hygiene and good community hygiene
- Immunization: all population should be immunized against some infections rather than wait to contract them and be managed. Example is the newly arrived Covid 19 vaccine in Nigeria, every Nigerian, infected or not infected of Covid 19, must be given the jab.
- Isolation of cases: very quick isolation of infected cases can help prevent the spread of these infections to other people
- Government and pharmaceutical companies should work together to ensure that all antibiotics and drugs in general are standardized and are of good quality
In conclusion, technological advancement has been made over the years in the use of drugs and antibiotics in particular. We have come from the era of high death rate due to infection such as pneumonia to a period where several antibiotics are available for managing several types of infections. We all should work together to ensure that we maintain this good momentum and never to return back to the dark eras. DON’T ABUSE ANY DRUG