India moves to tackle antibiotic resistance

摘要

Kumar Prabhash's voice is sombre as he describes how he is losing a key weapon in the fight against hospital infections. At the Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai, where the oncologist works, at least half of bacterial samples from patients with infections are resistant to carbapenems - a class of'second-line' antibiotics used to treat infections that are already resistant to other drugs. Just a few years ago, the resistance rate in such samples was only 30%. "That is really scary for us," says Prabhash.