Catastrophic antibiotic threat, Antibiotic resistance poses a catastrophic threat to medicine and could mean patients having minor surgery risk dying from infections that can no longer be treated, Britain's top health official said on Monday. --LONDON (Reuters) -
Sally Davies,
the chief medical officer for England, said global action is needed to
fight antibiotic, or antimicrobial, resistance and fill a drug
"discovery void" by researching and developing new medicines to treat
emerging, mutating infections.
Only a handful of
new antibiotics have been developed and brought to market in the past
few decades, and it is a race against time to find more, as bacterial infections increasingly evolve into "superbugs" resistant to existing drugs.
"And routine operations like hip replacements or organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection."
One of the best known superbugs, MRSA, is alone estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States - far more than HIV and AIDS - and a similar number in Europe.
And others are spreading. Cases of totally drug resistant tuberculosis have appeared in recent years and a new wave of "super superbugs" with a mutation called NDM 1, which first emerged in India, has now turned up all over the world, from Britain to New Zealand.
Last year the WHO said untreatable superbug strains of gonorrhoea were spreading across the world.
Laura Piddock, a professor of microbiology at Birmingham University and director of the campaign group Antibiotic Action, welcomed Davies' efforts to raise awareness of the problem.
Davies called on governments and organisations across the world, including the World Health Organisation and the G8, to take the threat seriously and work to encourage more innovation and investment into the development of antibiotics.
"Over the past two decades there has been a discovery void around antibiotics, meaning diseases have evolved faster than the drugs to treat them," she said.
Davies called for more cooperation between the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries to preserve the existing arsenal of antibiotics, and more focus on developing new ones.
Increasing surveillance to keep track of drug-resistant superbugs,
prescribing fewer antibiotics and making sure they are only prescribed
when needed, and ensuring better hygiene to keep infections to a minimum
were equally important, she said.
"The techniques of microbiology and new developments such as synthetic biology will be crucial in achieving this," he said.
(Editing by Jason Webb)
Via: News.Yahoo
