Number of superbacteria almost quadrupled in Brazil during health crisis

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Overcrowded hospitals. Long hospital stays. Strained health systems. Intubated patients. Pictures that have been repeated around the globe since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, caused by the coronavirus (Sars-CoV-2).

This scenario has also favored the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The number of superbacteria identified from Brazil has almost quadrupled in this period.

The data are from the Hospital Infection Research Laboratory of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute (IOC/Fiocruz). In 2019, the laboratory, part of the Analytical Sub-network of Microbial Resistance in Health Services (Sub-network RM) of the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa), detected just over a thousand.

In 2020, the number approached two thousand resistant bacteria sent for analysis. So far, in 2021, 4,276 samples have been received in the Fiocruz laboratory. The unprecedented and updated number was revealed to Metrópoles newspaper by the researchers.

The Anvisa network works as follows: the hospitals send the samples to the Central Laboratories (Lacens). The material is sent to the locations that participate in the network. Among them is the Hospital Infection Research Laboratory at Fiocruz, where the researcher and head of the unit, Ana Paula Assef, works.

“Several health agencies already had this concern before the pandemic because multi-resistant bacteria are already a problem in these hospitals,” she explains. “With the pandemic, we had many patients hospitalized for a long time with invasive procedures, such as intubation. It ends up favoring the emergence of secondary infections that are treated with antibiotics.”

The high use of these drugs was not unnecessary, clarifies Ana Paula, but “the overuse of antibiotics, in general, ends up making bacteria more resistant and multiply more”.

The concern with superbacteria, before the pandemic, gains severe contours amid health emergencies. In a technical note published in August on the subject, Anvisa cites a sad case in an intensive care unit (ICU) in Maringa.

Infected by antibiotic-resistant A. baumanii bacteria, seven patients previously hospitalized for Covid-19, out of ten, died. According to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), different countries in the American continent have reported outbreaks of drug-resistant infections.

PAHO data show that about 90% of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 in the Americas received antibiotics, while only 7 percent of them needed the drugs to “treat a secondary infection.”

With information from Metrópoles