Common germs are outsmarting medicine much faster than South Africa’s health system can keep up with them — and new research suggests there isn’t the money (or enough specialists) at state facilities to stop more bugs from becoming untreatable.
A paper published in Antibiotics in June showed that only three of 57 health facilities in KwaZulu-Natal have set aside money for teams to roll out South Africa’s official plan for curbing antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Just four out of 10 hospitals in the province had a microbiologist on their team and only two had an on-site infectious diseases specialist.
The country’s guidelines for dealing with AMR say…