[ExI] The post-antibiotic era

[BillK]

'Superbugs could erase a century of medical advances' experts warn.

Doctors issue new warning of devastating effect of over-prescribing
antibiotics for trivial ailments

<http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/superbugs-could-erase-a-century-of-medical-advances-experts-warn-8944617.html>

Quote:
Routine operations could become deadly "in the very near future" as
bacteria evolve to resist the drugs we use to combat them. This
process could erase a century of medical advances, say government
doctors in a special editorial in The Lancet health journal.

Writing in The Lancet, experts, including England's chief medical
officer, Dame Sally Davies, warn that death rates from bacterial
infections "might return to those of the early 20th century". They
write: "Rarely has modern medicine faced such a grave threat. Without
antibiotics, treatments from minor surgery to major transplants could
become impossible, and health-care costs are likely to spiral as we
resort to newer, more expensive antibiotics and sustain longer
hospital admissions."

About 35 million antibiotics are prescribed by GPs in England every
year. The more the drugs circulate, the more bacteria are able to
evolve to resist them. In the past, drug development kept pace with
evolving microbes, with a constant production line of new classes of
antibiotics. But the drugs have ceased to be profitable and a new
class has not been created since 1987.

Antibiotics are also used in vast quantities in agriculture, fisheries
and by vets, the resulting environmental exposure adding to bacterial
resistance, with further consequences for human health.

Writing in The Lancet, Professor Otto Cars of Uppsala University in
Sweden, and one of the world's leading experts on antibiotic
resistance, said: "Antibiotic resistance is a complex ecological
problem which doesn't just affect people, but is also intimately
connected with agriculture and the environment.
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BillK