Health TV Online/Kathmandu :  “Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is invisible, but I am not. So, AMR can happen to anyone,” said Felix Liauw of Indonesia, a caregiver of his 3-month-old son, who passed away sadly after extensive misuse and overuse of medicines. Felix is a member of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Task Force of AMR Survivors. “As a paediatrician and caregiver, I would like to share that we should give antibiotics or other antimicrobials only when we have a proper diagnosis.

We should be aware of hospital-acquired infections and do all we can to stop the transmission of infections.” He further said, “Right after birthing, my son had chronic diarrhoea and fever. A doctor (wrongly) diagnosed him with sepsis. His sepsis treatment changed from first-line antibiotics to second-line antibiotics to third-line ones (meropenem), but no improvement was there. After a genetic test, we learnt that my son had a rare genetic-mutation-related condition called congenital short bowel syndrome. Our child could not tolerate any kind of milk (breast milk or any infant formula feed). My son died after three months of being born.”

According to Thomas Joseph, Head, AMR Awareness, Campaigns and Advocacy, World Health Organisation (WHO) HQ and Chairperson of the AMR Awareness Working Group for the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat on AMR, AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites no longer respond to antimicrobial medicines. “As a result of drug resistance, antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines become ineffective and infections become difficult or impossible to treat, increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, disability and death. AMR threatens our ability to treat common infections and to perform life-saving procedures, including cancer chemotherapy and caesarean sections, hip replacements, organ transplantation and other surgeries,” he said.

Thomas emphasised while speaking at the Global Media Forum around World AMR Awareness Week (WAAW), organised by the Global AMR Media Alliance (GAMA) Misuse and overuse of antimicrobials; poor access to quality, affordable medicines, vaccines and diagnostics; lack of awareness and knowledge; population movement; lack of access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene; and poor infection and disease prevention and control in healthcare facilities and farms are the main drivers of AMR in the human health sector.

There are different types of antimicrobials, like antibiotics, which treat infections caused by bacteria, but there are also antivirals, which treat infections caused by viruses such as HIV, for example, or antiparasitics, which treat infections caused by parasites such as malaria, for instance, and antifungals, which are used to treat infections caused by fungi, such as yeast infections. “Data shows that there were 1.27 million attributable deaths directly caused by bacterial AMR in 2019, but the number of total associated deaths to AMR in a year is around 5 million. AMR deaths may increase by 50% in the next 25 years,” said Thomas.