Damascus-SANA
The world celebrates World Antimicrobial Awareness Week annually between 18 and 24 November to raise awareness of the problem of antimicrobial resistance, improve its understanding and encourage best practices in its control among the public, One Health stakeholders and policy-makers who all play a critical role in reducing antimicrobial resistance. This problem continues to appear and spread.
The theme of this year's World Antimicrobial Awareness Week, “Together Preventing Antimicrobial Resistance,” calls on all sectors to encourage caution in the use of antimicrobials and to strengthen preventive measures aimed at addressing antimicrobial resistance.
According to what the Director of Communicable and Chronic Diseases at the Ministry of Health, Dr. Zuhair Al-Sahwi, explained to SANA, antimicrobials include antibiotics, antiviral drugs, antifungals, and antiparasitics, which are drugs used to prevent and treat infections, indicating that the misuse of these antibiotics with excessive intake is a major driver. The emergence of drug-resistant pathogens, which the World Health Organization classifies as one of the ten major global public health threats facing humanity.
And Dr. Al-Sahwi indicated that antimicrobial resistance appears when changes occur in bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites over time, and they become unresponsive to drugs after that, which makes it difficult to treat infections and increases the risk of spreading diseases, severe illnesses, and deaths, pointing out that antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs become ineffective. Due to drug resistance, infections are becoming increasingly difficult or impossible to treat.
Al-Sahwi warned against using antibiotics to prevent or treat diseases without medical advice, stressing the need to strictly adhere to medical instructions for the type of antibiotic and the correct dose, because the indiscriminate use of antibiotics leads to a lengthening of the hospitalization period and an increase in the severity of the disease and death in some cases, in addition to the emergence of germs and microbes in the body. drug resistant.
Researchers estimate that antimicrobial resistance killed an estimated 1.27 million people in 2019.
Rama Rashidi
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