The drugs aren’t working as well as they used to.
That’s the sobering takeaway from new research published in The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia last week: The most commonly prescribed antibiotics in Southeast Asia are now only 50% effective at treating sepsis and meningitis in newborns.
And that’s a serious setback. Sepsis kills 1 in 5 patients. Meningitis is responsible for a quarter of million deaths a year – half among children under the age of 5. Overall, childhood infections are responsible for over 550,000 deaths each year.
Why aren’t the drugs doing their job? It’s because overuse of those drugs has led to the evolution of antimicrobial resistant infections – bacteria and other diseases that are no longer knocked out by treatment.
Dr. Phoebe Williams, a physician and lecturer at the University of Sydney, Australia School of Medicine and lead author of the new research, says that these antimicrobial resistant infections are responsible for “around 5 million deaths each year” of both children and adults.
Roughly 1 million of those deaths each year occur in Southeast Asia.
Babies are especially vulnerable. While an adult’s immune system is often strong enough to fight off these infections, children who haven’t had the chance to build up their immunity suffer the brunt of the consequences.
WHO’s recommended treatments are outdated
In the last 30 years, better health care for mothers and infants has helped cut child mortality in half, according to the World Health Organization; deaths have dropped from 5 million per year in 1990 to 2.4 million in 2020. But infections still pose one of the greatest threats to newborns. And the rise of these antimicrobial resistant infections is a major obstacle for the U.N.’s goal of ending all preventable neonatal deaths by 2030.
Williams’ research shows that in Southeast Asia these infections are increasingly antimicrobial resistant. “One of the units we work with in the Philippines, for example, their…
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