Global antibiotic consumption up by 46%, South Asian countries top the list: Study

Consumption of antibiotics has increased worldwide by 46 percent in the last 20 years, says a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health by the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Project.

GRAM studied 204 countries for antibiotics abuse and used a novel approach that utilized multiple data sources and statistical modeling techniques. Large scale household surveys were conducted in low-middle class income countries, antibiotic and pharmaceutical data were acquired from the World Health Organisation and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), for analysing and coming to a conclusion.

The findings provide a comparative analysis of total antibiotic consumption rates in humans in 1,000 populations per day.

The key findings:

Variation between countries studied in antibiotics consumption rates per 1000 population per day increased by 10 fold from 5DDD to 45.9 DDD.76 per cent increase was noticed in low and medium-income countries between 2000 and 2018  but in high-income countries, it remained stable.

Global antibiotic consumption rates increased from 9.8 to 14.3 DDD per 1000 population per day) between 2000 and 2018. The consumption rates grew highest by 116% in South Asia followed by North India at 111%.

The agenda for the study, lead author Professor Christiane Dolecek said is implementing WHO Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance to overcome inappropriate is of antibiotics leading to drug-resistant infections.