By AFP | 2024-11-08

DNIPRO, Ukraine -- Ukrainian soldier Anton Sushko, severely wounded, thought he was finally safe when he spotted a rescue team after crawling for hours through the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.

"That's it, I thought, here are the guys... We made it. Wounded, but alive," the 40-year-old recalled from his hospital bed in Dnipro, Ukraine.

But Sushko was not out of danger yet.

By the time he escaped, a wound on his left leg had become infected with aggressive bacteria resistant to antibiotics, making it harder for doctors to treat him.

Thousands of other soldiers have, like him, have come back afflicted with multi-drug-resistant organisms, pointing to a little-understood cost of the war.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) directly causes over a million deaths and contributes to five million deaths every year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

This trend has been accelerated by the massive use of antibiotics to treat humans, animals and food, including in Ukraine.

But Ukraine has seen a particular increase in AMR during the Russian invasion, according to the WHO representative in Ukraine, Jarno Habicht.

"The ultimate cause why we see the rise of AMR is actually the ongoing war," he said.

'Not in vain'

The Dnipro Mechnikov Hospital, where soldier Sushko was being treated, has seen a 10-fold increase in workload, said chief surgeon Sergiy Kosulnykov.

To save their patients' lives, teams often have no choice but to prescribe strong antibiotics.

And they rarely have time to wait for laboratory results determining the right antibiotics.

"It's impossible to imagine all of that without a growth in resistance," said Kosulnykov.

"The more we try to somehow kill a microbe, the more it defends itself."

The process sends doctors on a quest for ever stronger antibiotics to save the lives of patients.

As he waited, Sushko tried to find sense to it all.

"I distract myself with music; I read literature to go deeper into the roots of our people, for my soul to grasp that our guys aren't giving their lives in vain," he said.

The hospital usually managed to procure the right medication when soldiers' lives hung in the balance, Kosulnykov said.

'No complete victory'

"We need to better study the root causes of [AMR]" as the war continues, said WHO's Habicht.

Part of that research relies on monitoring, said Habicht, who added Ukraine had increased the number of laboratories monitoring drug-resistant bacteria to 100, compared to three in 2017.

Habicht emphasized the need for the war to end, as well as for monitoring and research to ensure appropriate treatment.

"We don't want to go back to the era where we cannot treat certain diseases," Habicht said.

Three weeks after AFP visited the hospital, Sushko went back home, his infection under control.

The hospital's team values any success, but Kosulnykov remained level-headed.

"People fought infections before me, and they will fight infections after me. There are some local victories, but there will be no complete victory."