The Centre may ban the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in agriculture following a report by the India Working Group of Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership. The GARP in its report to the Central government has recommended eliminating antibiotic use for growth promotion in agriculture, and lowering resistance-enhancing drug pressure through impro-ved antibiotic targeting. The GARP, headed by Dr N.K. Ganguly of the National Institute of Immunology, regrets that in India the burden of infectious disease is high but healthcare spending is low. In the last five years the use of antibiotics has gone up by 40 per cent and powerful antibiotics like cephalosporins by 60 per cent.

Antibiotics are increasingly used in agriculture and veterinary sectors to boost production, but their residue enters the food chain, ultimately leading to antibiotic resistance in human beings and animals. This also explains the spurt in hospital acqui-red diseases, and the emergence of new pathogens resistance to antibiotics. “The bacterial disease burden in India is among the highest in the world. Antibiotics will play a critical role in limiting morbidity and mortality in the country. As a marker of disease burden, pneumonia causes an estimated 4.1 lakh deaths in the country each year, and it is the No. 1 killer of children,” Dr. Ganguly said.

Many of these deaths occur because patients do not have access to life-saving antibiotics. At the other extreme, antibiotics are used in situations where these cannot be expected to improve the patient’s condition, particularly as treatment for the common cold and uncomplicated cases of diarrhoea, the GARP report submitted to the Centre pointed out.