‘With 700,000 people losing battle to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) per year and another 10 million projected to die from it by 2050, AMR alone is killing more people than cancer and road traffic accidents combined together.’ This was highlighted in the Review Article, ‘Antimicrobial resistance in the environment: The Indian scenario,’ published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research (IJMR), on June 03, 2019.
The article further noted, ‘AMR engendered from the environment has largely remained neglected so far,’ which has a snowballing effect. Illustrating the enormity of its impact, the researchers recorded: ‘Economic projections suggest that by 2050, AMR would decrease gross domestic product (GDP) by 2-3.5 percent with a fall in livestock by 3-8 percent, costing USD100 trillion to the world.’
Besides International media, fearsome consequences of AMR are also being highlighted by the Indian media from time to time. For example, on November 21, 2018, a leading national business daily carried an apt headline: ‘India in the firing line of antimicrobial resistance.’ More intensive coverage of such nature for this public menace, would hopefully appeal to the conscience of all those who can meaningfully address this situation, especially the government.
Against this backdrop, I shall explore in this article, whether India is really in the eye of this AMR storm, which is posing an unprecedented threat to many lives, perhaps more in India.
India is being called the AMR capital of the world:
Analyzing the emerging research data in this area, India was referred to as ‘the AMR capital of the world,’ in the 2017 Review Article, title ‘Antimicrobial resistance: the next BIG pandemic.’ Curiously, besides umpteen number of published papers documenting this scary development, very few enlightened individuals would dare to push an argument to the contrary. Whereas, besides framing a policy document on AMR,nothing much is changing in India on this score. This is happening, even when it is evidenced that a gamut of the most powerful antibiotics, are not working against many deadly bacteria. Added to it, India still doesn’t have a public database that provides death due to AMR.
Are adequate resources being deployed to fight the menace:
Today one would witness with pride that India’s ‘Chandrayaan 2’ lunar mission is moving towards the Moon’s south polar region, where no country has ever gone before. At the same time, despite AMR threat, India’s budgetary allocation for health in 2018-2019, reportedly, shows a 2.1 percent decrease of the total Union Budget from the 2.4 percent in 2017-2018.
It is interesting to note that India: ‘Despite being the world’s sixth largest economy, public health spending has languished at under 1.5 percent of GDP, one of the lowest rates in the world. For comparison, the United Kingdom shelled out 9.6 percent of its GDP in 2017 on health. The United States’ health expenditure is 18 percent of GDP.’
‘Ayushman Bharat’ and health care infrastructure:
Recently lunched public health program - Ayushman Bharat, although is not a Universal Health Care (UHC) program, it has targeted to cover ‘less than half the population and excluding 700 million people’. While giving a thumbs-up to this initiative, if one looks at the overall health infrastructure in India to make it possible as intended,…continue reading…
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