New Delhi: The Health Ministry of India has issued a directive mandating doctors in medical colleges to provide explicit justifications when prescribing antimicrobials to combat the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
The directive, conveyed in a letter dated January 1 by the Director General of Health Services, Dr. Atul Goel, urges doctors at all medical colleges across the country to adhere to this new requirement.
The letter emphasises the critical need for doctors to specify the exact indication or reason for prescribing antimicrobials, highlighting that the misuse and overuse of these medications contribute significantly to the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens.
Antimicrobial resistance ranks among the top ten public health threats globally according to global health authorities such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC).
The letter revealed that bacterial AMR directly led to 1.27 million deaths worldwide in 2019, with an additional 4.95 million deaths associated with drug-resistant infections. A recent government study titled “The First Multicentric Point Prevalence Survey of Antibiotic Use at 20 NAC-NET Sites India 2021-22,” conducted by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) under the Union Health Ministry, uncovered high levels of antibiotic use in India.
Notably, the survey indicates that “watch” group antibiotics, known for their higher potential for antimicrobial resistance, were prescribed more frequently (57%) than those categorised under “access” (38%) at the surveyed sites. The study also found that 4.6 per cent of patients had taken four or more types of antibiotics.ax
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