Every parent will always keep an eye on their children in order to protect them against the germs, as the children always love to crawl & play on the ground and used to put their fingers in their mouths. Superbugs that are resistant to specific antibiotics are also becoming more prevalent among infants and toddlers.

What Are Superbugs? 

Superbugs are a type of bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi that causes an illness that is resistant to some antibiotics and medications which are used to treat the infection that they cause.

Antimicrobial resistance(AMR) is a major threat to human and health development, influencing our ability to treat a range of infections with antibiotics, including urinary tract infections, sepsis, and some other forms of diseases. This drug resistance cannot be stopped but can be slowed down.

How It Affects the Health of Infants and Toddlers

Infants and toddlers who are living in areas where they have limited access to health facilities, poor sanitary conditions, and inadequate infection control are at a higher risk of getting infected by the superbugs and the spread of Antimicrobial-resistant bacteria. Recently, these germs like bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites are reducing child mortality and getting adapted to drugs and that were designed to kill them for the treatments like antiretrovirals, antimalarials, anti-Tuberculosis(TB) drugs, and antifungal drugs.

In many less developed countries, most childhood deaths occur due to common childhood diseases like malaria, pneumonia, and other respiratory infections as there are no essential antibiotics. Even if these drugs become resistant, the child’s life will be threatened. In recent data, around 2 million infants and children were exposed to multidrug-resistant TB, and every one out of two infants was also infected with HIV.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is not the only threat to infants’ chances of survival but also the lack of access to affordable antimicrobials. An estimated range of nearly 6.3 million deaths of children under the age of 5 was caused due to infectious diseases in the year 2016. And we also heard that the resistance develops more rapidly and leads to the misuse or overuse of antimicrobial medicines.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and their partners aimed to create an awareness of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to encourage the best practices among the healthy volunteers and the public. To prevent antimicrobial resistance they insisted on better handwashing habits and other basic hygiene practices to prevent themselves from staph infections.

Being guided by the convention on the rights of the child, recognition of the importance of the infant’s health rights is necessary and the government needs to develop policies and regulations and also to implement them to make sure infants, children, and their parents have access to the antimicrobials and how to use the medications.

We cannot fully control and stop infants from putting themselves under such circumstances. So it’s better to have a regular routine for toddlers & infants where we can protect them from the increasing risk of antimicrobial resistance(AMR). Still, researchers are diagnosing how these germs develop their resistance.