Superbugs Kill More In India Than Globally, Mortality Rate Is 13 percent

NEW DELHI, 18 NOV 2018: A first-of-its-kind study conducted on 4,000 patients admitted to 10 hospitals across India, including four from the capital, shows mortality rates owing to drug-resistant bacteria in the country are more than twice compared to that in high-income countries. 

According to the study, conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and The Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP) among others, the overall morality rate due to drug resistant bacteria in India was 13% in 2015. Most of the patients who died were either old or admitted to ICUs when they were diagnosed with the infection. The corresponding figure in advance nations ranged between 2% and 7%.

Death rate among patients with infections caused by superbugs - Multi-Drug Resistant (MDR) bacterial infections and Extremely Drug Resistant (XDR) bacterial infections - was two to three times higher when accounting for age, sex, site of infection and the number of co-infections.

The study titled, "The mortality burden of multidrug-resistant pathogens in India: a retrospective observational study" has been published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, a global medical journal.

Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and director of CDDEP in Washington DC, said infections caused by Gram-negative bacteria are associated with higher mortality rates compared to those caused by Gram-positive bacteria, with rates of 17.7 percent and 10.8 percent, respectively. ET Healthworld