Medical experts have expressed concerns over Nigerians unrestricted access to antimicrobials, especially over the counter from pharmacies, under-regulated patent medicine vendors and hawkers in the country.
The development if not controlled, they claimed, may take the country and the world at large back to the pre-antibiotic period when infections and wounds killed people freely.
They blamed this condition on many factors including the doctors, saying many doctors at times prescribed drugs without proper laboratory investigations to ensure whether or not antibiotics or antifungals are required for treatment of health conditions before them.
They, however, called on government, medical practitioners and the general public to work towards preserving the few antibiotics currently in the market to preserve their effectiveness since no new ones are currently being introduced.
They gave this position at a virtual media dialogue with experts and stakeholders organised on Friday, November 19, by St. Racheal’s Pharma to commemorate this year’s World Antimicrobial Awareness Week.
Speaking at the forum, one of the panellists, who is a Public Health Physician and Head, Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH), Dr Esohe Ogboghodo, said unrestricted access to antibiotics is one of the great factors resorting in their abuse and may also be the bigger driver of their resistance in Nigeria.
According to her, there are antimicrobials over the counter from pharmacies, under-regulated patent medicine vendors and hawkers in almost every corner of Nigeria and these stores often sell drugs that are outside the list of medicines approved for them.
In addition to that, she said, are other numerous itinerant drug sellers who go about hawking unapproved and poor-quality medicines to the public.
She said antibiotics are being over-prescribed by some health workers, sometimes as a result of patient’s demand or their own incompetency, while they are also being over-used by the public.
Ogboghodo, who is also Chairman of UBTH’s Infection Prevention and Control, maintained that the poor adherence to antibiotics prescription by individuals had played a major challenge in this regard, identifying financial incapability to purchase required doses or long duration of use and side effects experienced as some of the factors causing poor adherence to proper antimicrobial treatment.
She, however, listed consequences of antibiotic resistance to include limitation in doctor’s choices of treatment, increment in human pain and mortality rate, among others.
She described this situation as one of the major public health concerns in Nigeria and would need to be checked.
Another panellist and Consultant Clinical Microbiologist at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) Ikeja, Dr Bamidele Mutiu, also blamed health practitioners for contributing to the antibiotic resistance situation in the country.
According to him, some doctors are in the habit of prescribing drugs without proper investigation to ensure whether or not antibiotics are required.
Doctors in that category, he pointed out, would just be adding antibiotics (to their prescriptions) for their patients so as to make more profit or hasten the healing process.
“So, we health workers are also guilty of the practice and that is why awareness to stop resistance campaign should start with us,” he stressed.
In his own contribution, the convener of the discussion, who is Managing Director of St. Racheal’s Pharma, Mr Akinjide Adeosun, traced the problem of antibiotic resistance in Nigeria to many factors chief of which is the country’s high out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure.
Adeosun, who also identified pressure on patients to pay as another factor, said it often leads to the sub-optimal purchase of antimicrobial doses, thereby encouraging microbial to be resistant to available drugs.
He, therefore, advocated free and quality healthcare services particularly for children, saying such would greatly help particularly the financially poor parents to access the right treatment and the health workers to dispense appropriate doses of antimicrobials to patients.
He said now is the right time for health workers and other stakeholders including members of the public to start doing the right thing in this regard.
YOU SHOULD NOT MISS THESE HEADLINES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE
FALSE! Yoruba Not An Official Language In Brazil
Claim: A national newspaper and multiple online platforms claim Brazil has adopted Yoruba as its official language and that the language would be included in primary and secondary schools curriculum.
Verdict: The claim is false. The content of the article published by these online platforms is not new; it has been recirculated several times and has been debunked.
Experts blame doctors for Nigerians’ abuse of antimicrobials. Experts blame doctors for Nigerians’ abuse of antimicrobials.
and then