THE STANDARD
By
Charles Onyango |
March 6th 2021 at 00:00:00 GMT +0300
Globally, Anti-microbial Resistance (AMR) is threatening the very core of modern medicine and sustainability of an effective public health response to infectious diseases. The transformation of our health system should actually be from one that provides easy access to drugs into that which provides easy access to appropriate anti-microbial treatment while reducing the risk of emergence and spread of resistance. Kenya should work for a healthcare system that seeks to address the AMR, and traverses the entire continuum from prevention to care.
The goal should be to inform antibiotics best practices in healthcare and ensure the first-prescribed antibiotics are effective, improve health outcomes for all demographics and reduce infection rates, hospital admissions and costs, seek to reduce antibiotics uses on farms and in vet practices, and determine the link between drug resistance and food-borne diseases and use of organic fertilisers. And from the perspective of environment, we should aim to understand how antibiotic-resistance spread through wastewater or sewage, and recreational waterways and how — or if— this is affecting the human health.