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Antibiotic consumption rates grew by 46 percent after 2000, according to findings which also suggest lack of treatment access in some areas.

Variety of antibiotic medications

Global antibiotic consumption rates increased by 46 percent in the last two decades, according to the first study to provide longitudinal estimates for human antibiotic consumption covering 204 countries from 2000 to 2018, published in Lancet Planetary Health on Thursday by the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Project.

The excess and inappropriate use of antibiotics is an important driver of drug resistant infections, yet data on antibiotic consumption are scarce. GRAM, which includes researchers from the University of Oxford, the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), and the Institute for Health Metric and Evaluation (IHME), used a novel approach that deployed statistical modelling techniques, and incorporated multiple data sources and types, such as large-scale household surveys in low-and middle-income countries, pharmaceutical sales data, and antibiotic consumption data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

The study provides a comparative analysis of total antibiotic consumption rates in humans globally, expressed in the WHO metric of defined daily doses (DDD) per 1000 population per day. This equates to the proportion of people receiving antibiotics on a single day (on each single day in that year) in a given country.

Read the full story on the University of Oxford website