The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) recently found that over half of the nearly 10,000 hospital patients surveyed for a study were given antibiotics to prevent, rather than treat, infection. The survey mapped patients treated on one to five days each at 20 tertiary care institutes across 15 States and two Union Territories between November 2021 and April 2022. It found that 55% of the patients surveyed were prescribed antibiotics as prophylaxis, or as a preventive; only 45% were prescribed antibiotics to actually treat infections; and of them, only 6% were prescribed the drugs after identifying the specific bacteria. This is worrying as India carries one of the largest burdens of drug-resistant pathogens worldwide. 

Are antibiotics being over-prescribed in India? Here we discuss the question.