Drug resistance is one of the ugly new realities of our 21st Century, yet there are many cases where it is our own behaviour that is creating the problem. Yet, how do we change that behaviour?
For this is not some confined issue of taking too many antibiotics, when perhaps we don’t need them as there is no actual infection, or of taking any kind of medication without a diagnosis.
A really big driver of resistance is when we take enough of a drug to start resolving an infection and then don’t, you’ve got it, ‘complete the course’.
Sometimes it won’t matter. The medicine has done its magic, the infection or parasites are cleared: it may even have quite a long lifespan in our system and carry on clearing for us.
But the trouble comes when we have begun to counter the problem and don’t finish the job.
The disease and the bacteria, parasites, or even virus get a break from all that drug-induced elimination, and from, sometimes, a weakened point, or partially disabled, the elements that were most able to survive, get to revive and our infection flares up again.
That creates a disease strengthened against that medication, to be passed on, be it through mosquitoes, or contagious spread from one person to another, like tuberculosis, as we sneeze or breathe out into the surrounding air.
Yet, last week I saw figures putting ‘adherence’ to medications, which is where we follow the course, and take the right doses at the right time until the end, at 60 percent (for Kenya). That means 40 percent of us don’t.
Yet, consider where those instructions are given. They are often not fathomable from those small print leaflets tucked on super-thin paper into an entire box of medicines.
And we frequently buy only a few tablets, or a sheet of tabs from those boxes anyway - the small print leaflet is gone.
There may be a rushed 3x7 days written on a packet label from the pharmacy, or it may have been placed in nearly indecipherable handwriting on a prescription.
Yet, get the dosing wrong and we can end up even sicker than we began, and with less chance of the right medicine helping us.
So why aren’t we stepping in with super focus, a government working party, a select committee, an industry drive to find new tools and ways to communicate super clearly the course that must be taken and hold every sale to it, together with ready-made super-simple instructions?
Because, if we don’t, that 40 percent taking their medicines partially will create super drug-resistant parasites and infections making us all a lot sicker by 2030, with medicines we have rendered redundant.
The writer is a development communication specialist.
