Chandigarh, May 3: Only around eight per cent of bacterial infections resistant to antibiotics were treated appropriately in India in 2019, according to a new analysis of antimicrobial resistance in low- and middle-income countries published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.
Researchers, including experts from the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP) in Switzerland, reported that across eight countries studied — including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Mexico — nearly 1.5 million bacterial infections were found to be resistant to carbapenems, a last-line class of antibiotics used for treating serious, hospital-acquired infections.
Despite India procuring the highest number of antibiotic treatment courses — accounting for 80.5 per cent or 83,468 courses — only 7.8 per cent of infections in the country were treated appropriately.
Overall, just 6.9 per cent of the total infections identified across the study were addressed with proper treatment.
“The treatment gap is stark,” the authors noted. “In India alone, over a million infections were estimated, yet appropriate treatment remained low.”
Tigecycline, an antibiotic typically reserved for severe hospital infections, emerged as the most-procured drug across the countries surveyed.
The findings are part of a broader study drawing from the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) database and healthcare procurement data maintained by IQVIA, a US-based life sciences analytics firm.
The report also pointed to South Asia as a focal point for the growing crisis.
A separate Lancet study published earlier this year warned that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) could claim over 39 million lives globally in the next 25 years, with South Asia projected to bear the brunt of those deaths.
From 1990 to 2021, more than one million annual deaths were attributed to infections that became resistant to antibiotics — a phenomenon where disease-causing bacteria evolve to withstand drugs that were once effective.
Researchers said the findings provide the most up-to-date snapshot of how AMR is being managed in resource-limited settings and call for urgent global and national policy-level action to address the widening treatment gap.
