"If we don't stop handing out antibiotics like sweets,
even a cut finger could soon be fatal"
Potentially lethal bacteria can
resist our best antibiotic drugs
They are turning up in our water, on
our skin, in our public loos and in the food we eat.
They are potentially lethal bacteria
that resist our best antibiotic drugs, and these new super-infections are
emerging because we have created them — through our own hypochondria and
ignorance.
Yesterday, the chief medical officer
for England, Professor Dame Sally Davies, warned that the growing scourge of
antibiotic-resistant infections is set to cause a human catastrophe on the same
scale as international terrorism or global warming.
Her stark forecast might sound
sensationalist or even like science-fiction, but medical experts have flocked
to agree.
They argue that if we don’t tackle
this emerging danger, eventually something as simple as a cut to the finger
could be potentially fatal and major surgery would be very high-risk indeed.
According to Dame Sally, there are
two reasons for the problem.
The first is that we are massively
overusing antibiotic drugs, which effectively teaches bacteria how to resist
them.
The second is that pharmaceutical
companies are not working hard to produce any new antibiotics because they are
not seen as profitable.
‘We haven’t had a new class of
antibiotics since the late Eighties, and there are very few antibiotics in the
pipeline of the big pharmaceutical companies,’ Dame Sally said.
She warned: ‘If we don’t take
action, then we may all be back in an almost 19th-century environment where
infections kill us as a result of routine operations.
'We won’t be able to do a lot of our
cancer treatments or organ transplants.’
British doctors say there are two
particularly pressing dangers: the lung disease tuberculosis and the sexually
transmitted infection gonorrhoea.
Last month, researchers in the
British Medical Journal estimated that nearly one in 20 prescriptions for
antibiotics is actually unnecessary.
Mark Fielder, professor of medical
microbiology at Kingston University, Surrey, and a spokesman for the Society
for Applied Microbiology, explains: ‘To combat new drug-resistant strains of
tuberculosis, we are having to treat infections with three different strong
antibiotics at the same time.
'By doing this, we hope that the
bacteria won’t learn to resist all three at the same time.
‘With gonorrhoea, we are seeing a
large increase in the incidence of resistant strains.
'We are rapidly heading towards
seeing a form of gonorrhoea that will be very difficult to treat at all.
‘Dame Sally’s report is
unfortunately very accurate. If any infections like this become hugely
resistant, then they can become lethal.’
The danger of contracting
drug-resistant bacterial infections appears to be rising significantly.
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In January, for example, experts
from London University tested samples taken from 18 loos in public buildings in
the capital. Scientific tests, reported in the
respected journal PloS One, found high levels of the potentially lethal
Staphylococcus bacteria — and more than a third of these were resistant to
commonly used antibiotics.
The study reinforces previous
scientific research which warns that drug-resistant forms of bacteria are
building up in the environment, largely because of the fact that we are
consuming so many antibiotics at home and in hospital, then flushing them into
our water systems.
There, bacteria can ‘learn’ how to become immune to them.
But worse still, bacteria are also
‘learning’ how to resist drugs while they are inside our bodies because of the
over-prescription of drugs. Last month, researchers in the
British Medical Journal estimated that nearly one in 20 prescriptions for
antibiotics is actually unnecessary.
Doctors are handing out 1.6 million
needless courses every year. Experts place much of the blame for this problem on pushy parents. Sarah
Earnshaw, of the European Centre of Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC),
says: ‘Patients often ask for antibiotics, especially parents demanding them
for their children.’
And patients frequently insist on
antibiotics to treat colds and flu, despite the fact that these illnesses are
caused by viruses and not bacteria.
Last November, the ECDC wrote to all
family doctors to warn them of the implications of routinely giving
patients antibiotics because every single unnecessary prescription
increases the risk of bacteria becoming resistant to treatment.
Professor Mark Fielder explains:
‘When you attack an infectious bacteria with an antibiotic, it puts it under
stress and makes it more likely to make genetic mistakes when it multiplies.
'Those mistakes can actually help
the bacteria, by changing the very genes that the antibiotic drug was
successfully attacking. The drug can no longer get inside the bacterium.’ He adds that powerful anti-biotics
can also be rendered ineffective for ever if patients fail to finish their
courses.
‘You may stop taking the pills
because you feel better, but you haven’t wiped out all of the infectious bacteria,’
he says. ‘Those survivors, which have been
put under stress but not killed, may recover in a mutated form that the drugs
can no longer attack.’
Dangerous strains of bacteria have
also begun to learn a new trick. They are picking up a chemical from the
environment that can help them to defeat one of the main drugs that is intended
to destroy them. This phenomenon was first observed
in a Swedish patient of Indian origin in 2008. He was infected with Klebsiella
bacteria that caused pneumonia.
But his bacteria had incorporated a naturally occurring chemical enzyme into its system that can break up powerful
antibiotic drugs and render them useless.
Since then, this trick has been
observed in bacteria infecting patients in Britain, the U.S., India, Pakistan,
Japan and Brazil. Resistant bacteria can spread rapidly because they have
become super successful, says Fielder.
‘All these mutated bacteria now have
an advantage over their fellows — and so they get to multiply and become the
prevalent form of infection.’ Similar problems are developing in
farm animals, thanks to widespread overuse of antibiotics to keep them healthy.
The European Union has recently
banned farmers from routinely giving livestock drugs without even waiting for
them to pick up infections.
But across the world, this practice
is spiraling. Last month, Australian researchers warned that high use of
antibiotics in Chinese pig farms is producing antibiotic-resistant genes that
pose ‘a potential worldwide human health risk’.
A report in The Conversation, a
journal funded by more than a dozen Australian universities, found 149
different antibiotic-resistant genes in the Chinese commercial pig farm manure.
China is the world’s biggest
producer and consumer of antibiotics in the world, with at least 46 per cent of
antibiotics being used in livestock.
The Australian researchers warned
that the drug-resistant bacteria can leach into water, be transported by the
wind or human travel, or in agricultural products such as gardening compost —
and thus spread across the globe.
‘There is a real danger of resistant
bugs being transmitted from animals to humans,’ warns Professor Fielder.
‘Just one example is E.coli, which
we can get from consuming infected meat.’
Rapid global transport systems means
that any of these new super-infections can travel the world in days.
In response, our scientists should
be working harder than ever to develop new ways to defeat them. There are some promising new
developments on the horizon. Bacteria-killing substances found in exotic
aquatic creatures such as sea sponges and mollusc-type creatures called
ship worms look promising.
But proper research will cost many
millions of pounds and take a decade to finish — and there is the constant risk
that clinical trials will reveal unexpected side-effects.
Global support is needed. Dame Sally
is urging the Government to push for action during next month’s G8 Summit in
London.
The question is, will the world’s
leaders wake up in time to this emerging epidemic of drug-resistant infections,
or will they allow our hypochondria to propel us into a world where our best
drugs no longer work — and where the most apparently innocuous infections can
turn into a death sentence?
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