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Diseases from contaminated food and water are amongst the largest causes of illness and death in countries like India.

Most people who get sick are prescribed antibiotics, and usually recover. However, the pathogens causing these illnesses are increasingly becoming resistant to antibiotics, and this is a huge problem.

Major drug companies are no longer investing in finding new antibiotics, and it is scary to think that millions could die every year from infections that are resistant to all known antibiotics.

The article at this link talks about bioprospecting by various groups around the world, and these groups are finding promising new antibiotics – https://onezero.medium.com/inside-the-global-scavenger-hunt-to-beat-the-antibiotic-apocalypse-42e41472fcbb

However, these bioprospectors lack the resources (hundreds of millions of dollars) needed to test and bring these drugs to market.

India is one of the biggest potential markets for such new medicines, as India is expected to see a very large outbreak of antibiotic resistant infections.

The Government of India has a golden opportunity to partner with these bioprospecting groups through our national scientific institutions, and solve their financial problem by investing in large scale testing (trials), thereby helping to bring the drugs these groups have discovered into the market.

It costs much less to do this in India, and not only will this present large future revenue opportunities, but also create lower cost drugs for Indians who will need it the most.

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