The World Health Organisation (WHO) has issued a stark warning about how a dozen antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" pose an enormous threat to human health. It urges hospital infection-control experts and pharmaceutical researchers to focus on fighting the most dangerous microbes first.
Experts now consider such bacterial strains to be as dangerous as emerging viruses like Ebola or Zika. With the slow development of new antibiotics and the emergence of some superbugs against which there is now just a single effective antibiotic, a serious threat to public health already exists.
Superbugs kill an estimated 25,000 Europeans each year; drug-resistant infections in US children have increased seven-fold in an eight -year period. Among the microbes labelled a critical priority by the WHO are members of the Enterobacteriaceae family including bacteria like E.coli which causes urinary tract and blood infections, and Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic plague.
However, there is some disquiet that tuberculosis was omitted from the WHO list, ostensibly on the basis of it already being a priority. TB kills more people than any other bacteria, while in 2015 an estimated 580,000 people became ill from drug-resistant TB. Only two new anti-TB antibiotics have come to market since the mid-1960s and the use of both medicines is currently limited to the most severely resistant cases.
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As antibiotics lose their effectiveness, medical procedures – including organ transplants, Caesarean sections, joint replacements and chemotherapy – could become too dangerous to perform. Drug-resistant bacteria also pose a threat to patient safety: poor patient outcomes; higher morbidity and mortality; and higher costs are associated with infections caused by these microbes.
A recent review identified a particular risk to patients from the use of antibiotics in smaller hospitals in the Republic which do not have antibiotic stewardship programmes in place. The Government must face up to its responsibilities in the critical fight against antibiotic resistance as well as contributing to a robust international response.