"Coloniser" Microbes: AMR Raises Global Concern Over Antibiotic Resistance (image/Pixabay)
Antimicrobial Resistance or AMR, is raising health concerns on global level. Doctors, scientists and public health experts voiced alarm that some of the world’s most reliable antibiotics are becoming less effective against what is called as the “superbugs.”
AMR occurs when the bacteria, viruses, and parasites stop responding to medicines. It will make people sicker and increasing the spread of infections, said World Health organization (WHO). AMR is thought to contribute to millions of deaths every year. WHO said it will cause increased suffering, particularly in low, and middle-income countries.
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WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated the antimicrobial resistance threatens a century of medical progress. He said the bacteria could return the world to the “pre-antibiotic era, where infections that are treatable today could become a death sentence.”
Health experts say that the world needs new solutions. Speaking to Al Jazeera, DR Sylvia Omulo, a doctor of epidemiology, called the said microbes “colonisers.” She called them so due to the way they spread, often harmlessly, inside humans and animals.
Omulo, who has investigated the links between humans, animals and their shared environments, and the microbes that live inside all of them for almost 20 years, stated that the AMR is called colonisers because they are the ones that people carry without necessarily showing symptoms.
She said they are trying to study why people carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their gut and in their nose.
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Omulo said they are looking into why such bacteria are entering certain people and not others. On the question of how AMR is an urgent global threat, she said, “Before and after people leave hospitals, they come from a community, and afterwards they return. So all the processes that happen there contribute to what you see in the hospital. Does that mean if you stop using antibiotics, [AMR] will go away? Absolutely not. There are lots of studies that show that AMR hangs out in the environment, years after antibiotic use has been stopped.”
She also added that until the problem is really understood, “We are only just touching one part of the elephant without realising that the elephant is a much bigger animal with different textured parts.”
(With inputs from Al Jazeera)
