In what is being referred to as a "catastrophic event" for the world of medicine, Britain's top medical official has announced that a rising scourge of "antibiotic resistance" is a concern the world needs to consider immediately.
Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies made the announcement on Monday, March 11, saying that global action is required to fight antibiotic/antimicrobial resistance.
Otherwise, Davies warns, as relayed through Reuters, patients going in for even minor surgery could risk infection and possibly even death from diseases we'll no longer be able to cure.
"Antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat. If we don't act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can't be treated by antibiotics," Davies says.
Davies added that the surgeries she's talking about could be as commonplace as hip replacements or organ transplants.
Over the past few decades, there have only been a "handful" of new antibiotics developed and marketed for public consumption. It's literally becoming a "race against time" to fight the increasingly evolving "superbugs" that are proving to be resistant to extant drugs.
MRSA is an example of one such superbug that, with a fatality rate of 19,000 per year, kills more people in the U.S. every year than HIV/AIDS and has a similarly devastating rate in Europe.
There are numerous other superbugs that have hit the world hard, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis and untreatable strains of gonorrhea. "Super superbugs," bolstered by the NDM 1 mutation, first appeared in India but are now seen throughout such varied locales as Britain and New Zealand.
"There are an increasing number of infections for which there are virtually no therapeutic options, and we desperately need new discovery, research and development," Antibiotic Action Director Laura Piddock says, agreeing with Davies.
Piddock is also a professor of microbiology at Birmingham University in addition to the work she does for the Antibiotic Action campaign.
Saying that "diseases have evolved faster than the drugs to treat them," Davies has called upon governments and organizations across the globe (such as the World Health Organization and G8) to take this looming threat seriously and to develop more antibiotics to combat it.
Davies also hopes there will be more collaboration between the realms of healthcare and pharmaceuticals to do so.
"The techniques of microbiology and new developments such as synthetic biology will be crucial in achieving this," President of the Society for General Microbiology Nigel Brown said.
Like what you're reading? Follow @profklickberg.
