Overview

A sweeping analysis uncovers the causes of-and solutions to-one of the most daunting public health challenges facing the world today: antibiotic resistance exploding in India. The discovery of antibiotics was one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, dramatically increasing human lifespans. Yet today, with antibiotic-resistant superbugs implicated in as many deaths as HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, the limits of these miracle drugs have become alarmingly clear. At ground zero of the growing crisis is India, one of the world's largest consumers of antibiotics and a powerhouse in pharmaceutical manufacturing. In A World of Resistance, Assa Doron and Alex Broom draw on years of fieldwork in hospitals, in pharmacies, and on factory farms to examine the enormous social and environmental costs of overreliance on antibiotics. They show how an overtaxed healthcare system with limited oversight, widespread use of antibiotics in industrial agriculture, and the incessant dumping of pharmaceutical waste into waterways have created the ideal conditions for antibiotic-resistant microbes to grow. As resistance spreads across India and beyond, Doron and Broom argue that the solution isn't to restrict access to antibiotics but to embrace culturally relevant forms of health education, indigenous practices, and policies grounded in social solidarity. Only then, the authors contend, is it possible to turn the page on India's precarious relationship with antibiotics and to address resistance globally before it is too late.

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9780674295612

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Reviews

Doron and Broom present a compelling vista of the ongoing race between antibiotic regimes to improve human health in India and the growth of microbes resistant to these antibiotics. Based on intensive ethnography, a wide range of interviews, and a remarkable array of secondary sources, the authors offer a cautiously optimistic reading of the futures of microbial modernity in large and unequal societies like India. -- Arjun Appadurai, author of <i>Banking on Words</i> The incisive and comparative insights that Doron and Broom offer through their meticulous ethnography of the use and misuse of antibiotics in India make this book a groundbreaking intervention in political and cultural studies of our changing relations with the microbial world we inhabit. A must-read for anyone interested in the planetary environmental predicament that humanity finds itself facing today. -- Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of <i>One Planet, Many Worlds</i>

Doron and Broom present a compelling vista of the ongoing race between antibiotic regimes to improve human health in India and the growth of microbes resistant to these antibiotics. Based on intensive ethnography, a wide range of interviews, and a remarkable array of secondary sources, the authors offer a cautiously optimistic reading of the futures of microbial modernity in large and unequal societies like India. -- Arjun Appadurai, author of <i>Banking on Words</i>

Author Information

Assa Doron is Professor of Anthropology and South Asia at the Australian National University. He is the coauthor of Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India and The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life. Alex Broom is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney. He is the author of several books on the social dynamics of health, illness, and care, including Survivorship: A Sociology of Cancer in Everyday Life (with Katherine Kenny).

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