Efforts to reduce child mortality in Africa via mass treatment with the antibiotic azithromycin (AZM) may lead to increased drug resistance in bacteria that frequently cause pneumonia and meningitis, highlighting the need for careful monitoring, finds a new study led by UCL.
The study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, is a collaboration with researchers from the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Programme, the University of Liverpool, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Yale University.
It provides the first data on how mass antibiotic drug administration (MDA) for infectious diseases – whereby all eligible members of a vulnerable population are treated with a particular drug to reduce childhood mortality – may shape bacterial populations over time,…