By most standards, the increasing availability of life-saving antibiotics in the developing world is a good thing. But, around the globe, overuse of these drugs has created resistant strains of deadly bacteria — and they could be a greater threat in poorer nations than in richer ones, owing in part to a lack of regulation.
Up to 95% of adults in India and Pakistan carry bacteria that are resistant to β-lactam antibiotics — which include carbapenems, considered to be antibiotics of ‘last resort’ — according to research by Timothy Walsh, a medical microbiologist at Cardiff University, UK, that is due to be published in The Lancet. By comparison, only 10% of adults in the Queens area of New York carry such bacteria. The spread of resistance is “more than we could have imagined”, Walsh says.
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