Antibiotics Warning: Resistance 'Growing'

By Enda Brady, Sky News Reporter

The world faces "unimaginable setbacks" unless it tackles the growing threat of resistance to antibiotics, according to an international group of experts.

The latest research by the 26-strong group predicts major problems unless governments work together immediately.

Antibiotic resistance happens when bacteria evolve mechanisms to withstand the drugs which are used to fight infection.

Lead author Professor Otto Cars, of Uppsala University in Sweden, said: "The causes of antibiotic resistance are complex and include human behaviour at many levels of society.

"The consequences affect everybody in the world.

"Within just a few years, we might be faced with unimaginable setbacks - medically, socially, and economically - unless real and unprecedented global co-ordinated actions to transform the way antibiotics are regulated and developed are taken immediately."

In the UK, research is focusing on how plant chemicals keep insects at bay

In September, the UK Government announced plans for a five-year strategy to tackle the problem, setting aside £4.5m.

Recent decades have seen vast increases in the use of antibiotics across medicine and agriculture, but the scientists argue that without adequate regulatory controls and better patient awareness, the huge global surge in antibiotic resistance will continue.

They say the problem is compounded by a desperate shortage of new drugs to treat multi-drug resistant bacterial infections.

Prof Cars added: "Antibiotic resistance is a complex ecological problem which doesn't just affect people, but is also intimately connected with agriculture and the environment.

"We need to move on from 'blaming and shaming' among the many stakeholders who have all contributed to the problem, towards concrete political action and commitment to address this threat.

Prof Laura Piddick says more funding is needed to develop new treatments

"Consumers and providers of antibiotics alike need to be empowered to tackle antibiotic resistance, as well as ensuring that those in need benefit from affordable, effective antibiotics."

One of the British scientists who helped compile the report said that alarm bells have been ringing - and ignored - for many years.

"For a long time there has been a sense of crying wolf over this," said Professor Laura Piddock, from the University of Birmingham.

"Science has been telling us about this problem for years. We need more academic research and funding. New treatments have been hampered by a lack of funding. It has always been viewed that this is something that the pharmaceutical industry should do."

At the John Innes Centre in Norwich scientists are going back to nature for the answers, studying how plants like eucalyptus trees produce chemicals to keep insects at bay.

"Plants have a distinct disadvantage in that they can't move out of the way of predators," Tony Maxwell, the centre's head of biological chemistry, told Sky News.

"And they have no end of predators, large and small animals, insects and bacteria. They have to produce a whole array of chemicals to defend themselves. What we are trying to work out is how we can use those chemicals for our own usage in antibiotics."

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