Washington:
The US health regulators have approved a new antibiotic to treat urinary tract infections, a problem that affects more than 100 million people worldwide, mainly women, said the British pharmaceutical giant GSK on Tuesday.
The company said that the United States Food and Medicines Administration approved the use of the product, called Bljepa, for the treatment of so -called urinary tract infections without complications in adults and girls of 12 years or more.
It is the first of a new class of oral antibiotics for urinary tract infections, said GSK scientific director Tony Wood, who described the approval of the FDA as a “crucial milestone.”
While there are other antibiotics to treat these infections, this new medicine “will bring another option to patients who received recurrent infections and resistance rates to existing treatments,” Wood said.
Repeated use of antibiotics has led to the appearance of bacteria that are increasingly resistant, which causes infections to cause more to cure.
A study published in 2019 concluded that 92 percent of bacteria that cause urinary tract infections are resistant to at least one antibiotic and 80 percent are resistant to at least two.
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