Drug-Resistant Germs in India Spreading to West, Scientists Say

[Joanne98]

Source: Bloomberg

Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- People who travel to India and Pakistan for cheaper health care may be at risk from a new type of drug-resistant bacteria, an international team of scientists reported.

The researchers found a gene that enables the bacteria to resist treatment with a class of antibiotics called carbapenems in 1.9 percent of samples from patients in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Haryana, according to the study in the journal Lancet. Reports from 37 patients in the U.K. who had the resistant strains were also analyzed, and the researchers found that most had received treatment at hospitals in India and Pakistan.

When carbapenems are ineffective, doctors are limited to two drugs: Colistin, a 50-year-old medicine known to cause kidney damage, and Pfizer Inc.’s Tygacil. If millions of people in the Indian subcontinent must rely on these last-resort medications, it’s only a matter of time before resistance develops for these drugs, Timothy Walsh, who led the study, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

In the last three to four years, this kind of resistance has “increased dramatically in India and continues to increase,” said Walsh, a professor of medical microbiology and antimicrobial resistance at Cardiff University in Wales. “The possibility of this becoming a global problem very quickly is immense.”


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