Alarm over superbugs rise

Health Correspondent

Thursday 7 April 2011

SCIENTISTS have issued a warning about the rise of new superbugs resistant to the most powerful antibiotics.

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Helen Puttick Health Correspondent

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said there are less than a handful of drugs in the pipeline with the potential to fight new antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Experts claim the misuse of antibiotics in patients and in the food chain is fostering the emergence of drug-resistant superbugs and threatening to take the world to an era before the discovery of penicillin in the 1920s.

Medical care could return to an age where simple infections do not respond to treatment and routine operations become life-threatening, they warned as part of a campaign timed to coincide with World Health Day.The organisation estimates 25,000 people die of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections in the European Union every year. Most cases, it says, are acquired in hospital.Last year, concerns were raised about the emergence of enzymes known as carbapenemases that affect the usefulness of a common group of antibiotics. Researchers identified a carbapenemase-producing gene known as NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamose after the place where it was discovered) which is carried by bacteria, making them resistant to drugs.Dr Anne Eastaway, consultant microbiologist at Health Protection Scotland, which monitors superbugs in Scottish hospitals, said a surveillance programme looking for resistant bacteria had been established in Scotland and a special group was driving guidance on the appropriate prescription of antibiotics.She added: “Scotland is up there among the best in terms of where we have got surveillance and alert systems, but we have to remain ever vigilant.”Dr David Livermore, director of the antibiotic resistance monitoring and reference laboratory at the Health Protection Agency in England, said: “So much of modern medicine – from gut surgery to cancer treatment, to transplants – depends on our ability to treat infection.“If resistance destroys that ability then the whole edifice of modern medicine crumbles.“Fighting the emergence of resistance is fighting evolution itself. To keep ahead, it is vital we conserve the antibiotics we have – using them carefully – and that pharmaceutical companies and regulators support the development and licensing of new antibiotics.”New research has been published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal showing that disease-causing bacteria carrying NDM-1 have been found in the drinking water supply in New Delhi, India. It was claimed that patients who have had cosmetic surgery or organ transplants in India or Pakistan have brought the bug back to the UK.The Health Protection Agency said it had recorded 88 cases of bacteria with NDM-1 in the UK so far, with most of the patients being linked to India.

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Alarm over superbugs rise

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