Prevention and Treatment of Infective Complications During Cancer Therapy

Although there is advancement in the treatment and overall management of cancer leading to significant improvement in prolonged survival of cancer patients, infections still remain a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in this group of patients with neoplastic diseases. Neutropenia and subsequent infectious complications are among the most serious treatment-related toxicities of cancer treatment and result in preventable morbidity and mortality [1, 2]. However, with the increasing antimicrobial resistance (AMR), both in pre and post-Covid-19 era, it has become a challenging task for the clinicians to treat infections among these patients who are prone to such infections because of a complicated matrix of host’s immunodeficiency, local tumor effect, treatment-induced immunosuppression and environmental effect. AMR-related infections claim at least 50,000 lives each year across Europe and the US alone, with many hundreds of thousands more dying in other areas of the world. But reliable estimates of the true burden are scarce [3].