Fighting Killer Bugs in Babies

Children under five years old are fragile. They’re more vulnerable than adults to malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, and other infections. A growing number of these infections that sicken and kill children are resistant to the drugs developed to treat them – a phenomenon known as antimicrobial resistance, or AMR.

AMR is a big killer. Nearly five million deaths are caused in part by drug-resistant infections each year. While the percentage of children killed by these infections has fallen greatly since 1990, hundreds of thousands still die. 

Vaccines can help.  So can infection control measures as simple as handwashing routines. Patients everywhere also need to be able to get the best antibiotics to treat their infections at the right time. These infections are often more difficult to treat in low- and middle-income countries in part because they have fewer staff to clean and to care for patients, less access to effective antibiotics, and crowded neonatal units, which can worsen the spread of germs.

In a special edition of One World, One Health recorded for AMR Awareness Week, we spoke with Dr. Heather Finlayson, a Pediatric Infectious Diseases Specialist at Stellenbosch University’s Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.

Listen as she tells us about her struggles fighting drug-resistant superbugs in the youngest of children.