Additives
Antimicrobial additives: strength in numbers Essentially invisible to the naked eye, antimicrobial plastic additives are the best protectors of plastic applications and will be ever so needed after the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns ease worldwide, as the focus on staying safe becomes vital, says Angelica Buan in this article.
Keeping pathogens at bay with additives More than the emergence of new pathogenic/ coronavirus strains, the world has a bigger beast to tame, which is the growing resistance of the human body to antibiotics and medications. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), rising bacterial infections are increasingly resistant to the medicines that can treat them. The WHO’s Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS) has aggregated data from more than 64,000 surveillance sites with more than 2 million patients enrolled from 66 countries across the world for this study. WHO says high rates of resistance among antimicrobials frequently used to treat common infections, such as urinary tract infections or some forms of diarrhoea, indicate that the world is running out of effective ways to tackle these diseases. The inappropriate use of antibiotics during the Covid-19 pandemic could also exacerbate resistance, according to WHO.
The growth of the antimicrobial additives market is driven by rising awareness about healthrelated issues due to infections, viral outbreaks and other lifethreatening ailments
22
MAY / JUNE 2020
