HYDERABAD: Getting admitted in a hospital may be doing more harm than good. Acinetobacter baumannii bacteria — which is one of the major causes for hospital acquired infections — are fast developing multi drug and extreme drug resistant strains, says a new study by city-based experts.
Acinetobacter is one of the six ‘ESKAPE’ bacteria across the world that causes most hospital acquired infections, even inside highly sterile Intensive Care Units. The bacteria is known to cause diseases like pneumonia, infections of the blood stream, urinary tract and skin.
The findings are based on a study conducted by researchers of Kamineni Academy of Medical Sciences and Research Centre in Hyderabad, published in the Indian Journal of Microbiology Research this month.
The researchers went to a tertiary hospital in Hyderabad and isolated 143 strains of Acinetobacter over a span of one year (July 2016 - June 2017). Of them, a whopping 131 strains (91.6 per cent) were found to be multi drug resistant and 126 of them (88.1 per cent) had developed extreme drug resistance.
This means that many strains of bacteria have become resistant to Carbapenems, a class of antibiotics that was developed to treat people affected by multiple drug resistant bacteria. Carbapenems was developed for bacteria that had already become resistant to drugs like penicillins, cephalosporins, fluoroquinolones and aminoglycosides. The last resort for doctors now is to use Colistin or Tigecycline. However, this is not an easy task as they are mostly dealing with patients in the ICU, whose immunity levels are already low.
“It’s difficult to treat a patient who has been affected by extreme drug resistant strain of Acinetobacter as the other drugs which can work on the strain might not suit the patient,” says the lead author of the published paper Dr A Swathi. “For example, Colistin is a nephrotoxin, which means that a patient having kidney problem cannot take it. Then doctors have to try double Carbapenem combination. There have been patients who survived Acinetobacter infections for more than a month and there are also cases of patients who died due to the infection,” adds Swathi who is also working as a consultant microbiologist in the city.
Where do they hide?
Acinetobacter infection occur in ICU mainly in patients who have invasive treatments going on like being on a ventilator
In the Hyderabad study, a majority of the samples of Acinetobacter came from Endotracheal Aspirates, Suction tips and tracheal tips
Acinetobacter is listed as ‘Critical’, in WHO priority pathogens list for Research and Development of new antibiotics
Solutions
Dr Swathi points out three important things to be followed:
Infection control practices to be adopted inside hospitals
Appropriate prescription, administration of antibiotics by doctors
Ensuring that pharmacies do not sell antibiotics without prescription