Today’s trend needlessly prescribing antibiotics exposes Sri Lankans to the threat of becoming antibiotic resistant as fifty per cent of antibiotics currently prescribed are unnecessary. This was revealed at a symposium organised by the Ministry of Health, last week.
Professor of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo,Prof. Priyadarshani Galappatthy told the symposium that 55 per cent of individual antibiotic purchasing in Sri Lanka, are done without a doctor’s prescription.
According to the data presented by her, antibiotics has been a substantial contributor of the annual drug bill of Sri Lanka. In 2010, Sri Lanka has spent Rs. 2.1 billion on antibiotics while the cost has increased to Rs. 2.9 billion in 2017, which is 12.5 per cent of the total drug bill.
“Even some of our doctors dispense antibiotics to patients unnecessarily.Antibiotics are dispensed for bacterial infection, not for virus infections. But they think that antibiotics would prevent secondary bacterial infections and issue to virus infected patients. That is completely wrong” said Prof. Galappatthy.
It was disclosed that by 2050, 10 million people in the world would die due to antibiotic resistance and Asia is at the hub of it.