Hyderabad: City doctor is now increasingly prescribing the popular antibiotics during grandfather’s time.
This is to fight antimicrobial resistance which has become a major health disorder with bacteria that causes illness and smart rotating fungi to appear as a superbug.
The Covid-19 season only permeated the rise of drugs that were forgotten to treat bacterial and fungal infections.
The drugs used by returning in the 1940s are now prescribed to attack modern superbugs with old medical bullets.
Because germs are now not used to old antibiotics, they become vulnerable and die.
“Forgotten formulations have now appeared as a modern savior.
Experiments with old antibiotics to defeat antimicrobial resistance is to pay rich dividends,” said Dr.
P Ranganadham, Nerves, Sunshine Hospital, Gachibowli.
He said since the penicillin, was found in 1928, there were many drugs that save humanity.
But, excessive or abuse of drugs caused antitimrobial resistance forcing doctors to look for new drugs.
Even the third and fourth generation antibiotics do not respond in certain cases.
Stating that Olden’s day antibiotics came cheap and tested time, Dr.
Ranganadham, who had seen the evolution of drugs in the past four decades, told TOI that because some of the forgotten antibiotics such as Colistin and Clindamycin could also develop the spread of horizontal resistance, doctors had to think Combination therapy.
“It has been proven to handle AIDS and TB,” said Dr.
Ranganadham.
According to Dr.
Shyamala Iyengar, a senior consultant, internal treatment, Apollo Hospital, Hyderguda, India has one of the highest levels of resilience to antimicrobial agents.
“One strategy to overcome it is to use extraordinary antibiotics such as the Trimetoprim Sulfamethoxazole for ‘Staphylococcus aureus’ which is meticillin resistant.
For gram-negative organisms that resistant drugs, the use of older antibiotics such as polymeguin B has become part of the standard protocol, “Dr.
Shyamala said.
Dr.
Gopi Krishna Yedlapati, Past Consultant Intervention, Yashoda Hospital, said with all the developments of the third and fourth generation antibiotics, new drug resistant bugs appeared.
“With the ongoing pandemic, we have seen that some old and cheap antibiotics have contributed to helping patients who are sick out of the suffering of their sepsis.
They have saved innumerable lives,” said Dr.
Gopi Krishna.
“Older and simpler antibiotics may have an important role in modern medicine,” said Dr.
J Anish, Consultant, Internal Medicine, Apollo Hospital, Jubilee Hills.
“But it is more important not to use antibiotics for each fever or infection as antibiotics work only for bacterial infections and then only a few.
And, infection can be viral where antibiotics are not successful,” said Dr.
Anish.