29 December 2022

There is an urgent need to develop antibiotics for newborn babies, a population that is particularly vulnerable to antibiotic resistance, according to leading global public health experts including those from India. Recent estimates show about 2.3 million newborns die of severe bacterial infections each year while an increasing number are becoming resistant to currently used antibiotics, the experts said in a report published in the December 2022 Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

Over the last decade, AMR has worsened to the point where around 50-70 per cent of common pathogens show a high degree of resistance to available first and second-line antibiotics, they said.

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