Alarm over the rising deaths due to antibiotics resistance
By George Kebaso, November 19, 2024Dr John Kariuki, an assistant director, Directorate of Veterinary Services at the Veterinary Public Health Division, loved to play and watch football with his children.
“Okay, my story started in October of 2020 when I had an accidental slip and fall in my bathroom that caused a fracture of the hip joint,” he tells the gathering.
A surgical operation came with a complicated infection where he was operated, which was followed by a painful stay in hospital. The infection did not go away and it became more and more severe as time went by, forcing him to be hospitalised for five months.
“This was a hospital acquired infection,” he tells the attentive audience, gathered yesterday during the launch of the World Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Awareness week of action in Nairobi.
During the hospital stay, Dr Kariuki recalls using up to 18 antibiotics as part of pain management and care for the infection. However, out of the 18, only one turned out to be effective.
After five months, he was released to go home still with the infection. Luckily, he knew a little about AMR, and went for a laboratory test for antimicrobial sensitivity.
Dr Kariuki says that’s when he learnt that out of 18 antibiotics only one was effective.
“We administered that one for a course of five days and that is how I recovered exactly one year after the incident and after the infection. So, I continued recuperating,” he says, highlighting that he could become part of the 1.3 million statistics of people who global data shows have succumbed due to AMR.
Global threat
“I used to be a very good social player of football and now I can only watch football,” he narrates, calling for concerted efforts with political goodwill to direct resources, and a sizable amount of this funding for research and development, in an attempt to combat or mitigate against AMR.
Antimicrobial resistance- or AMR- is one of five global threats to public health and anyone is vulnerable. A small infection that will not respond to any of the drugs available, may ultimately lead to death.
Statistics are showing that in 2019, approximately 1.27 million deaths were directly linked to AMR and another five million indirectly attributed to this condition. It is projected that if nothing is done right away, by 2050 about 10 million people will die annually directly due to AMR.
Experts are calling for efforts at individual level in mitigating against this and the community is encouraged to use Infection Prevention Control (IPC) measures such as hand washing and hygiene and the use of vaccination in order to prevent disease.
“We also call upon people to prudent use antibiotics, not to use antibiotics unnecessarily, to treat conditions like common cold, conditions that don’t really require an antibiotic,” advises Dr Loice Ombajo, an Infectious Diseases Specialist at the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH).
She explains that antimicrobial resistance basically means that we are in a place where organisms that cause infections are resistant to the drugs, or what we call antimicrobials, that are used to treat them.
Bacteria will cause things like pneumonia, like urinary tract infections, infections of the skin, of the joints, of the abdomen, and are common infections.
“Things like fungi will cause infections in the bloodstream. Malaria and TB, those are common infections, which means if you’re not able to treat them because they’re resistant to the drugs that we use to treat them, then cost of care becomes expensive,” she notes.
As a result, she says, people die because of common, previously easy-to-treat infections.