For how we live.
Every article we have published on Antimicrobial Stewardship, newest first.
Across 41 hospitals in 19 Asian countries, ACORN-HAI found 73.7% of severe bloodstream and ventilator infections were drug-resistant, and 37.7% of those patients died within 28 days.
Urinary infections in men were long treated as automatically complicated. A randomised trial found seven days of antibiotics non-inferior to fourteen, and guidelines say not to treat urine that causes no symptoms.
In one civilian-hospital series, 84.6% of wound isolates were multidrug-resistant; in a military cohort, 60% of Pseudomonas isolates were extensively drug-resistant. The war is also a resistance event.
Most acute ear infections settle on their own, and antibiotics barely change symptoms in the first day. Their benefit is real but modest, which is why guidelines allow a short period of watchful waiting.
Resistance is not something your body develops. It is an evolutionary property of bacteria, spread on mobile pieces of DNA — and it was already linked to nearly 5 million deaths a year before the forecasts began.
POET II randomised 508 stabilised patients to stop antibiotics or complete the standard course. The safety endpoint met noninferiority; relapse of infection did not go the same way.
ACT-South Asia randomised 1,847 patients in Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Treatment failed in 5.1% of each group — no benefit from the second antibiotic, and a point in favour of stewardship.
In the phase 3 Integral-1 trial, cefepime plus the new β-lactamase blocker nacubactam cured 82% of complicated urinary infections versus 61% for imipenem, offering a way to spare carbapenems.
The AVENIR trial met its resistance endpoint in the gut but not the nose: giving the antibiotic to under-fives lifted macrolide resistance 16% above placebo communities.