Deadlier than cancer, India’s sepsis crisis is entangled with antimicrobial resistance

In November 2024, a 32-year-old male resident of Delhi was rushed to a nursing home for shortness of breath and fever. He was treated with carbapenem, a high-end antibiotic used to treat severe bacterial infections, but showed no improvement over the next 48 hours. Instead, he developed symptoms of septic shock such as low saturation and low blood pressure.

His family took him to Medanta Hospital where the treating doctor suspected that the young man – who had undergone surgery for a brain tumour in the previous year and was on chemotherapy and radiation therapy – had contracted a very severe infection in one of the hospitals he had frequently been in and out of.

“We immediately put him on the ventilator and ordered molecular testing of his respiratory secretions, which in a matter of hours, would help identify the infection and the medicines it would respond to,” Yatin Mehta, chairman, Institute of Critical Care and Anaesthesiology, Medanta – The Medicity Hospital, told IndiaSpend.

“We identified Klebsiella, a virulent bug, along with the medicine it would respond to, with which the patient started to recover and we were able to take him off the ventilator in three to four days,” said Mehta.

Sepsis is a life-threatening medical emergency occurring when…

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