A recent analysis found that doctors in the U.S. still prescribe less-effective generic medicines instead of FDA-approved seven next-generation antibiotics to battle infections caused by gram-negative bacteria.
According to the researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, gram-negative bacteria are a class of bacteria resistant to multiple drugs and increasingly resistant to most antibiotics.
For the study, the researchers analyzed a large administrative database to determine inpatient usage of newly approved gram-negative antibiotics, including ceftazidime-avibactam, ceftolozane-tazobactam, meropenem-vaborbactam, plazomicin, eravacycline, imipenem-relebactam-cilastatin, and cefiderocol.
The study found that doctors prescribed older medicines to more than 40 patients battling with highly resistant pathogens, even though it was known to be highly toxic or sub-optimally effective.
The findings published in Annals of Internal Medicine, stressed that the usage of older antibiotics not only affects health of patient, but also threatens future development and supply of antibiotics.
The researchers noted that several hospitals located in rural areas were reluctant to adopt newer antibiotics, which costs approximately six times more than the older medications.
Also, the study highlights that the newer antibiotics are used more in hospitals, where the lab results showing positive effects of medicines is shared with the patients, encouraging them to drop old medications.
The authors recommend that, “Future public health policies and economic strategies on further development and use of similar antibiotics should be designed to identify and overcome additional barriers”.
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