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Accepted Paper:
Of (chemo-)therapeutic toxicities and care: examining AMR in an oncology hospital
Purbasha Mazumdar
(IHEID)
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) has come to garner immense attention in the contemporary global health arena as the next crisis-in-the-making. Although the causes and effects of Antimicrobial Resistance are varied and dissipated across scales and geographies the efforts at containing the growing rates of resistance have identified particular sites of intervention. The hospital has emerged as one such site of consternation and attendant intervention where Infectious Diseases (ID) doctors work to re-articulate the relationship that patients and doctors alike have with these therapeutic molecules. Cancer patients, whose immunities have been ravaged by chemotherapies and the cancer itself, are one particular subsection of patients who are especially susceptible to infections that need therapeutic after-care in the form of significant volumes of antimicrobials. By drawing on several months of ethnography in an oncology hospital in Southern India, where these chemotherapeutic toxicities came to the fore, this presentation seeks to understand how antimicrobials sit uncomfortably as fundamental therapeutic after-care and as molecules increasingly implicated in dynamics of triage under the sign of growing rates of AMR. By so doing the presentation seeks to ask questions about how we are to understand the implications of the heavily mediated accounts of dwindling antimicrobial efficacies, the complicated ecologies of their un-doing and the interventions we have come to imagine as most feasible.