Health experts from around the world have met in Nairobi to discuss the growing burden of resistance to antibiotics.
The experts met with officials from the Pharmacy and Poisons Board to discuss medicine quality and antimicrobial resistance research.
The emphasis is on improving access to antibiotics and ensuring their appropriate use.
The team is exploring handheld technologies for screening the quality of medicines that could be useful in low-resource settings.
They include Celine Caillet from Oxford University, Ida Johnson from the Food and Drugs Authority of Ghana, Assma Gafur Omargy from the National Medicines Regulatory Authority of Mozambique, and Mohammed Fakrhul Islam from the Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA) of Bangladesh.
“The experts also shared good practices for pharmaceutical quality control laboratories and discussed opportunities for future collaboration,” PPB said in a statement.
The director for laboratory services at PPB team was Obadiah Naikuni and the head of post-marketing surveillance and focal point for antimicrobial resistance Karim Wanga.
In November, the Ministry of Health warned that one in five deaths caused by the resistance of bacteria and viruses to medicines occurs in children below the age of five years.
Resistance to antimicrobials has been rated as the leading cause of death globally, higher than HIV/AIDs or malaria.
Antimicrobials are medicines that destroy disease-causing microbes, also called pathogens, such as certain bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi.
The most familiar and important antimicrobials are antibiotics, which treat bacterial infections.
Antimicrobial resistance occurs when disease-causing organisms undergo adaptive changes that enable them to withstand antimicrobials.
“In recent times, overuse and misuse of antimicrobials have caused avoidable AMR emergence and spread,” the ministry warned.
“As a result, antimicrobial agents are rapidly losing their effectiveness in both developing and developed countries.”
Experts in the recent past have raised an alarm that treatment of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDs is at risk from the threat of resistance to antibiotics unless urgent action is taken to reverse the trend.
Without effective antimicrobials, the success of modern medicine in treating infections, including during major surgery and cancer chemotherapy, would be at increased risk.