Antibiotic-resistant bacteria increasingly leaving children vulnerable to common infections, global study finds

Frequent antibiotic use is often a medically necessary, life-saving treatment for patients like Harry Booth, but using the same antibiotic too much can also make bacteria resistant to it. View image in fullscreen Frequent antibiotic use is often a medically necessary, life-saving treatment for patients like Harry Booth, but using the same antibiotic too much can also make bacteria resistant to it. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria increasingly leaving children vulnerable to common infections, global study finds Exclusive: Research spanning 82 countries finds antibiotic resistance increased in every region between 2004 and 2022 Harry Booth has had a rough run through Australia’s coldest months. The 13-year-old has been in and out of hospital with a range of common chest and urinary tract infections that his doctors find challenging to treat. Harry was born with kidney failure and began dialysis at six months old, before receiving a kidney transplant from his father at age four. The surgery saved his life but comes with a trade-off: he now needs to take medications that suppress his immune system to prevent his body from rejecting the kidney. It makes him more vulnerable to infections – and the bacteria which causes these are resistant to several commonly used antibiotics. Instead, doctors reach for different, less commonly used drugs and administer them intravenously for several days, before sometimes giving him oral antibiotics. Once, he required a procedure to clean the bacteria from his bladder. The treatments are often demanding and take him away from home and school. Frequent antibiotic use is often a medically necessary, life-saving treatment for patients like Harry, but using the same antibiotic too much can also make bacteria resistant to it. ‘Alarming’ rates of babies with antibiotic-resistant bugs in Asia-Pacific, Australian study finds Read more His mother, Eileen, says while back-up treatments are working, she worries about what will happen if her son’s infections become resistant to those drugs, too. As it stands, they are carefully treated only if they meet certain symptom and bacteria thresholds. Harry is not an outlier. Life-saving drugs used to treat common childhood infections are increasingly failing, and the resistance of bacteria to these medicines will only worsen over the next decade, a global analysis has found . Led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) in collaboration with the University of Sydney in Australia, researchers analysed 106,581 infection samples from children aged up to 18 years old across 82 countries. They found antibiotic resistance – when bacteria are no longer killed by antimicrobial medicines – increased in every region between 2004 and 2022. Babies and children in intensive care, and countries with fewer healthcare resources, are most affected, according to the findings published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday. Paper co-author and MCRI associate professor Penelope B