Lab capacity, environmental surveillance platforms expanded to address AMR in India: Minister

New Delhi, Nov 29 (IANS) Understanding the seriousness of the rising antimicrobial resistance (AMR), India has expanded lab capacity and environmental surveillance platforms to address drug resistance in the country, said Anupriya Patel, Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, on Saturday.

Addressing a two-day conclave AMR NEXT 2025 at Amrita Hospital, Faridabad, Patel, along with global health leaders, scientists, and innovators, deliberated on ways to accelerate India’s policy response, strengthen surveillance, and catalyse innovation across human, animal, and environmental health systems.

“India recognises the need to address antimicrobial resistance and has instituted a National Action Plan integrated with the principles of One Health,” said Patel.

“We expanded laboratory capacity, standardised testing methods, and linked human, animal, and environmental surveillance platforms. This has allowed us to detect trends, respond rapidly, and contribute data to global surveillance systems with the WHO,” she added.

Globally, AMR is rising at an alarming pace and threatening to erode decades of medical progress.

India continues to face some of the world’s highest burdens of bacterial infections. National AMR surveillance data show troubling resistance patterns in pathogens such as E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, and Acinetobacter baumannii.

While ICMR’s latest data indicate a modest improvement in E. coli susceptibility to ceftazidime (from 19.2 per cent in 2023 to 27.5 per cent in 2024), rising resistance to carbapenems and colistin remains a red flag, signalling diminishing treatment options.

The experts pointed to multiple drivers behind India’s AMR surge, such as high infectious disease load; excessive and inappropriate antibiotic use in human and animal health; OTC availability of antibiotics; inadequate diagnostic stewardship; and pharmaceutical waste and hospital effluents contaminating water systems.

These trends are expected to impose enormous economic costs through prolonged hospital stays, increased treatment expenses, and productivity losses.

“Antimicrobial resistance continues to impose a significant and growing burden on health systems, increasing mortality, prolonging hospital stays, and driving up the cost of care,” said Dr Sanjeev Singh, Medical Director at the Hospital.

Professor Alison Holmes OBE, Lead for the Centres for Antimicrobial Optimisation Network, Imperial College London, called for a “strengthened, coordinated international effort to advance the fight against AMR”.

–IANS

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