The Silent Battle in Ukraine: How Drug Resistant Infections Could Become a Global Threat

On the front line, a Ukrainian soldier survives a drone strike. He, unlike so many Ukrainian soldiers since the full-scale invasion in 2022, survives the explosion. He survives the trench, and the days-long evacuation. He finally reaches a hospital where he should be able to breathe a sigh of relief. But instead of healing, he dies alone, in an overburdened hospital, from an infection that drugs can no longer fight. This is the reality for some Ukrainian soldiers right now. While the world’s attention is focused on the front line, a silent battle is raging in the country’s hospitals: infections are becoming increasingly difficult to treat and people are losing limbs and dying unnecessary deaths.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. In Ukraine today, unlike other recent wars in the 21st century, infections have days, weeks, and sometimes even months to spread. Many soldiers endure a long and complicated evacuation pathway – from point of injury to stabilization points to hospitals – where every transfer creates new risk of the infection spreading. Ukrainian medical workers are operating under extraordinary circumstances. Every day they save lives in unimaginably stressful conditions. But they are also extraordinarily well-positioned to become leaders in fighting multi-drug resistant organisms, also known as MDROs. Infection mitigation and management is one of the less visible needs created by the war. Treating these recalcitrant infections requires more than developing new drugs. Ukraine needs to understand and contain them by learning how they emerge and how they move between patients and hospitals. That means funders and stakeholders investing in laboratory capacity, data collection systems, outbreak tracking, and improving complex wound management. Infection mitigation and management is one of the less visible needs created by the war. It doesn’t photograph well. And solutions aren’t simple. But it is crucial – not just for the patients surviving today, but for patients who haven’t been born yet, in hospitals nowhere near this war. Other Topics of Interest Why the Baltics Are Right to Worry About Putin’s Latest Reassurances Putin denied plans to attack Europe but revived Russian-speaker grievances in the Baltics, echoing rhetoric Moscow used before invading Ukraine. These infections can easily emerge in a hospital in Denmark, Germany, or even the United States. Resistant organisms are an immediate issue in Ukraine, but they’re by no means exclusively confined to its borders. MDROs have long been a top priority of the World Health Organization and other global health organizations – it is not a new issue, but a crisis that experts have been warning about for years. No modern healthcare system has ever been forced to address wartime infections on such a scale, under such pressure, and in real time. Acknowledging the problem creates an opportunity to solve it. We must see this hardship as a necessary way to save lives, and also a unique opportunity to transform medicine for the patients, doctors, and hospitals of tomorrow. The world will remember the drone strikes. It should also remember the infections that killed the soldiers who survived them. Ukraine didn’t have years to figure out drones. It won’t have years to figure this out either. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post. Dan SolchanykDan Solchanyk is Director of Health at Razom for Ukraine