New Delhi: The Indian scientific community has hailed the recent consensus by global political leaders to phase out the use of medically significant antibiotics in the agriculture and food production sectors. For India, it is a crucial step in addressing the country’s growing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) problem. AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi change over time, and are no longer susceptible to the common medicines used to treat them.
It is a serious global public health crisis. The aforementioned decision was rolled out on 26 September, as part of the political declaration of the second High-Level Meeting on AMR, during the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). “Compared to the political declaration of 2016, this declaration marks a big positive shift in the way the world wants to address AMR from agri-food systems.
It is a huge step forward,” Sunita Narain, Director General, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based environment research and advocacy organisation, said in a statement. India, one of the signatory countries to the UN declaration, introduced its National Action Plan on AMR (NAP-AMR) in April 2017, shortly after the UN’s first High-Level Meeting on AMR in 2016. Despite having an existing action plan, India continues to report cases of alarming rises in superbugs, which are pathogens resistant to multiple antibiotics and are extremely difficult to treat.
This issue was found in 21 of the cou.
