ISLAMABAD: Senior Physician Thursday stressed that the country needs an improved surveillance of antibiotic resistance (AR), regulation of the appropriate use of quality medicines and education about the consequences of overuse.
General Physician Ziauddin Hospital Karachi Dr Ejaz Vohra suggested creating sufficient awareness among the public for resisting misuses of antibiotics.
He viewed that misuse of antibiotic has become an issue of grave concern in the present context. So, all the government and non-government entities concerned should come forward and work together to address the problem on a priority basis.
He said that in Pakistan around 88pc of unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions were for self-limiting upper respiratory tract infections.
He said that people should only use antibiotics when prescribed by a certified health professional and always take the full prescription, even if they feel better because not completing the prescribed dosage will help bacteria become antibiotic resistant.
Popping too many antibiotics increases the risk of bacteria becoming resistant to the drugs which is called antibiotic resistance, he said.
He mentioned people around the world including Pakistan currently die due to over use of antibiotic each year.
“Antibiotics use in Pakistan is higher as many doctors prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics without proper diagnosis”, he said, adding this was why a growing number of infections such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea are becoming difficult to treat as the antibiotics become less effective.
“Most viral infections don’t even require antibiotics” he stressed.
He emphasized that hand hygiene and other infection prevention measures are important for every patient.
Doctors should be educated and well aware about the use of antibiotics and they should remind their patients to take antibiotics prescription exactly as prescribed, he added.
With the World Health Organization (WHO) ringing alarm bells, countries across the globe have woken up to this catastrophe.
However , for this purpose WHO recently launched a mass awareness campaign for public that would help in decrease the rate of people using unnecessary antibiotic.
“In many settings, doctors are prescribing antibiotics without carrying out proper need assessment,” he said, adding that there was massive misuse of antibiotics in the livestock and agriculture sector, too.
He advised , the use of antibiotic in poultry and milk should also be discouraged as it is damaging health of our future generation.
He explained , the trend of self-medication not only affects the usual process of diagnosis, but it also delays the therapeutic treatment and produces a number of side effects as well like gastrointestinal disorders, fatal anaphylactic shock and other severe complications.
Unused medicines should always be returned to any local pharmacy for safe destruction, he said.
Common colds and flue are for example caused by viruses, not bacteria, meaning that antibiotic therapy would be ineffective to treat these infections, said, adding, not only that, by using antibiotic treatment unnecessarily, other bacteria in the environment as well as the ‘healthy’ bacteria in the body gets the opportunity to develop resistance due to exposure, which can potentially cause antibiotic resistant infections later on.”
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