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Discussion with Dr. V Ramasubramaniam and Dr. Mahalakshmi M. Ravi

As part of human practises we decided to perform two tasks. First, we decided to have a discussion with a doctor who specialises in infectious diseases so that we could get a closer look at the real world situation regarding antibiotic resistance. Dr. Ramasubramanian, a senior consultant in Infectious Diseases, HIV, Tropical Medicine and Travel Medicine at Apollo Hospitals. He specialises in Infection Control, HIV medicine, Tropical Infections and Travel Health.

The doctor explained to us that antibiotic use could be called a tragedy of the commons, and it was inevitable that bacteria would develope resistance sooner or later with such widespread use of antibiotics. A tragedy of the commons occurs when multiple individuals, acting solely out of self-interest, ultimately exhaust a limited shared resource despite the fact that it is not in the community’s long-term interests. Antibiotic use has been called a tragedy of the commons, because although individuals might benefit from the use of antibiotics, concerns exist about the irreparable societal effects of antibiotic resistance developing from the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in clinical and agricultural settings.

Dr. Mahalakshmi is the chief medical officer at Institute Hospital, IIT Madras. We had a chance to meet her during our human practices campaign, where we were spreading the awareness about Antibiotic Resistance through our posters. We talked about how we can minimize the risk of antiobiotic resistance by spreading the awareness inside the campus. We explained our project to her that how we are solving the problem of antibiotic resistance. She liked our idea to spread the awareness through the posters as she raised the concerns that it is difficult for the doctors to talk about this to each patient as there is a huge inflow of patients every day.