Anurag Yagnik

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'Superbugs' kill india's babies...

Terrible news this morning in The New York Times about how a perfect storm of casual overuse of antibiotics, poor sanitation, population pressure, absence of monitoring and ill-equipped healthcare industry is creating extremely resistant bacteria that just cannot be killed by current medicines and this is responsible for causing a rapid increase in deaths specially in babies whose immune systems tends to be fragile. 

Terrible as the news is, it doesn't sound surprising. Not to anyone who grew up there anyway. One could just walk up to a chemist shop and buy pretty much what one felt like. All you needed was money (and medicines were much cheaper compared to the west) and not a prescription. 

While this probably helped the population grow at one time, seems like now it will work the other way. Hard to say if what seems good today will actually be good in the long run. "Who can say?", a colleague used to say. I guess the chickens must come home to roost.