Antibiotic resistance is gradually becoming a bigger crisis than the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s, a landmark report warned today.
United Nations officials have confirmed that the spread of deadly superbugs that evade even the most powerful antibiotics is happening across the world .
The effects will be devastating – meaning a simple scratch or urinary tract infection could lead to death.
Antibiotic resistance has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country, the U.N.’s World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a report.
It is now a major threat to public health, of which ‘the implications will be devastating’.
‘The world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,’ said Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health security.
One of the best known superbugs, MRSA, is alone estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the U.S. – far more than HIV and AIDS – and a similar number in Europe.
Drug resistance is caused by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them.
‘Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating,’ Dr Fukuda said.
Laura Piddock, director of Antibiotic Action campaign group and a professor of microbiology at Birmingham University, said the world needed to respond as it did to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
‘Defeating drug resistance will require political will, commitment from all stakeholders and considerable investment in research, surveillance and stewardship programmes,’ she said.
Jennifer Cohn of the international medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières agreed with the WHO’s assessment and confirmed the problem had spread to many corners of the world.
‘We see horrendous rates of antibiotic resistance wherever we look in our field operations, including children admitted to nutritional centres in Niger, and people in our surgical and trauma units in Syria,’ she said.