Mariam Alkattan

Do you self-medicate with antibiotics for common colds or mild fevers? Have your antibiotics stopped being effective? Research has found that India has one of the highest rates of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the world. This means more and more people will not respond to antibiotics when they fall sick. At the same time, no new antimicrobials are being developed to treat drug-resistant infections.

For Fulbright-Nehru Student Researcher Mariam Alkattan, this was an opportunity to study AMR in India and spend the next nine months setting up a research lab from scratch. Alkattan has a Master of Science in environmental engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was hosted by the National Forensic Sciences University in Gandhinagar, where she started her Fulbright-Nehru tenure in April 2022.

A large part of Alkattan’s research involved sampling water bodies over several months in and around Ahmedabad to check for biological contamination and drug resistance. The team found that out of the almost 100 water samples they collected, every sample contained resistance to at least one of the drugs they were tested against. In addition, many of the samples were resistant to multiple drugs, a significant finding that implies the presence of infections that are more difficult to treat.

Above: Fulbright-Nehru Research Scholar Laura Gascogne exchanges ideas with Asit Das, a stone sculptor, during a terracotta workshop at Bankura University’s Jamini Roy Institute of Art & Culture (Abhibyakti) in West Bengal.

Below: A large part of Mariam Alkattan’s research involved sampling water bodies over several months in and around Ahmedabad to check for biological contamination and drug resistance.

Contamination of water bodies by human and animal waste, crop pesticides and pharmaceutical waste has wide ramifications for those who use these water bodies as sources for drinking, cooking or washing, and leads to AMR mutation and creates antibiotic resistance.

Even though the study of AMR has a long way to go in India, according to Alkattan, her research aims at creating standardized testing for AMR. “We don’t even have a standard method [to measure AMR]. With our research, hopefully, we’ll be able to provide information on accuracy and ease of use of tests.”

Alkattan spent the first few months of her fellowship learning things she had never been taught before. “I had to learn from reading the available literature, and create a research program from scratch,” she says. “This was incredibly difficult, but something I could only do with Fulbright; it gave me the time and freedom to do that.” Alkattan hopes to establish some groundwork on AMR before she leaves India. “I hope the payoff of doing something so complicated is that we have a foundation of data and methods for scholars to continue AMR research,” she says. Alkattan leaves behind the lab, which was not there when she arrived. She has also created some fun memories in the process. “While collecting samples in Ahmedabad, one site was really close to an ice cream shop. So, we used to go to ‘sample’ the ice cream,” she giggles.

Going forward, Alkattan hopes, through her work, to “share information on best practices and inform policy regarding environmental AMR.”