Warning: Use of antibiotics is dangerous

Hyderabad: Clamping down on antibiotics abuse is very important. An increasing number of children are not responding to treatment in intensive care units due to over-use or abuse of antibiotics, said pediatricians at a conference organised in the city.

Pediatricians acknowledged that heavy use of antibiotics by medical practitioners had become a major challenge and there was a strong need to advise them and also members of the community to not use antibiotics at random.

Dr S.S. Kamath, president of the Indian Academy of Pediatrics said, “In India, doctors face a problem when they do not prescribe antibiotics. But people have to understand that continuous consumption or prescribing of antibiotics is leading to resistance, which is making it very difficult to cure serious health conditions. Thus, there is a very strong need at the level of medical practitioners to have a strategy for judicious use of antibiotics and at the same time to counsel the public of its misuse.

“Due to the misuse, there is also a strong need for alternative solutions for combating diseases.” While pediatricians have for long been advising against misuse of antibiotics, there is no concrete policy till date.

Organising committee chairman Dr P. Sudershan Reddy said, “The need of the hour is to re-visit medical concepts and focus on preventive measure rather than rely on advanced cure methods. This comes from the fact that more people are dying due to increased resistance antibiotics.”

While there is no compiled data or statistics in India, doctors are now making efforts to compile cases where antibiotics have not worked despite aggressive treatment.

Experts who attended the forum stated that there was a need to study how cases were dealt with before the introduction of antibiotics.

There is a strong need to define the periods into pre-antibiotics era and antibiotics era which will give a fair idea of the manner in which cases were handled earlier, they said.