A World of Resistance
India and the Global Antibiotic Crisis
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
A sweeping analysis uncovers the causes of—and solutions to—one of the most daunting public health challenges facing the world today: antibiotic resistance exploding in India.
The discovery of antibiotics was one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, dramatically increasing human lifespans. Yet today, with antibiotic-resistant superbugs implicated in as many deaths as HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, the limits of these miracle drugs have become alarmingly clear.
At ground zero of the growing crisis is India, one of the world’s largest consumers of antibiotics and a powerhouse in pharmaceutical manufacturing. In A World of Resistance, Assa Doron and Alex Broom draw on years of fieldwork in hospitals, in pharmacies, and on factory farms to examine the enormous social and environmental costs of overreliance on antibiotics. They show how an overtaxed healthcare system with limited oversight, widespread use of antibiotics in industrial agriculture, and the incessant dumping of pharmaceutical waste into waterways have created the ideal conditions for antibiotic-resistant microbes to grow.
As resistance spreads across India and beyond, Doron and Broom argue that the solution isn’t to restrict access to antibiotics but to embrace forms of health education, indigenous practices, and policies grounded in social solidarity. Only then, the authors contend, is it possible to turn the page on India’s precarious relationship with antibiotics and to address resistance globally—before it is too late.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This alarming and deeply perceptive study from anthropologist Doron (Waste of a Nation) and sociologist Broom (Survivorship) examines why India has become ground zero for the global explosion in antibiotic resistance. The authors begin with the "haunting statistic" that an estimated 58,000 Indian newborns die each year from antibiotic-resistant sepsis (not to mention the half million Indians who died in 2021 from drug-resistant tuberculosis, or the country's horrifying new drug-resistance strains of cholera and typhoid). From there, they emphasize that an urgent solution is needed for India's crisis but that "oversimplified" explanations of Indians as overusing antibiotics, in both medical and agricultural contexts, due to poverty, inadequate sanitation, and overburdened healthcare systems don't paint a full picture. The real issue, they explain, is the country's massive, and growing, pharmaceutical industry. India, they argue, is "saturated" with antibiotics, and like any drug, its very presence creates an epidemic of usage. Indeed, reminiscent of the American opioid epidemic, the authors find that "assertive medical representatives... promote new antibiotics to doctors and play a key role in creating incentives for overprescription." The influence of pharmaceutical sales reps, plus the complex machinations of the country's "hybrid public-private health-care system," have created "a cycle of antibiotic dependence," as the authors astutely put it. Incisively argued and genuinely terrifying, this is a must-read for those whose work touches on epidemiology and public health.
