Everything You Need To Know About Antimicrobial Resistance

 Our environment is full of marvelous creations, including living beings, nature, microscopic organisms, and everything else that exists. Amongst all these organisms exist the microbes and other unease-causing creatures. 

The world is at a high risk of diseases after the striking waves of Covid-19. The healthcare systems all over the globe are still recovering from the hit, and to say that we are vulnerable would be an understatement. We commonly don’t focus on what goes on in creating our health care products like medicines, vaccines, and others. These products contain antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, and anti-parasitics to prevent and treat humans, animals, and plants from infections. 

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is evolving to threaten global health and development. According to reports by WHO, AMR is one of the top 10 threats to public health. 

Antimicrobial Resistance 

The ability of the microbes like bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites to develop a resistance against the medicines is known as antimicrobial resistance. This phenomenon makes treating the infections and unease caused by these microbes difficult to treat hence increasing the risk of disease spread, deaths, and severe illness.

The drug-resistant ability of the microbes makes antimicrobial medicines ineffective, making it difficult or even impossible to treat infections. 

Impact of Antimicrobial Resistance 

Antimicrobial resistance has severely impacted mortality and public health. Along with these impacts, antimicrobial resistance majorly affects the economic sector, and several consequences can be taken into account, such as the specialized types of equipment, more expensive antibiotics, more extended hospital stays, and even extended isolation periods for the patients. 

Why is it a concern at the Global Level?

The rapidly developing antimicrobial resistance by the microbes poses a significant threat to all our health and our abilities to treat common infections. The global rate of antimicrobial resistance is alarmingly increasing, and the modified stronger bacterias are thus causing and spreading diseases that are not treatable and causing a global panic. 

Major antibiotics are becoming increasingly ineffective as antimicrobial resistance is spreading globally, resulting in a higher mortality rate over the globe. The current working antibiotics might get useless once the microbes develop resistance causing the healthcare to fail again. 

The increasing threat also results in the increase in the cost of AMR to the national economies and their health care systems.

Contributing factors to Antimicrobial Resistance 

Broadly speaking, Antimicrobial Resistance is a natural phenomenon where the microbes develop a resistance to the antimicrobials used to eliminate them. 

The inappropriate use of components in the antimicrobial is a major contributing factor to increasing antibiotic resistance. These components can be wrong choices, poor adherence to treatment guidelines, and inadequate dosing. The four main stages involved in the development of antimicrobial development are antimicrobials used in human medicine in the community, antimicrobials used in human medicine in hospitals, antimicrobials used in agriculture and animal production, and the antimicrobials used in the environmental compartment. 

How to prevent Antimicrobial Resistance? 

The public is becoming aware of this alarming situation and has found ways to prevent AMR to a limit.

• The duration of antibiotics should always be based on the infection and the health problems a person may have. 
• Efficient monitoring and mapping programs worldwide aid in studying the resistant threats.
• Collectively limiting the use of antibiotics will automatically assist in slashing down the rates of antibiotic resistance.  

Conclusion 

Over the years, the intensity of the AMR has been increasing like anything, and the scientific community and society now recognize it at large as an issue we all need to tackle together. Together we can assist in strengthening and harmonizing the AMR surveillance through adopting measures to enhance the ability to share and compare related resistance information and better levels of coordination of the surveillance networks.