From UK DAILY MAIL

Superbugs 'will send the health service back to 19th century': Even routine surgery could become deadly, warns top medical adviser

  • Dame Sally Davies warns over timebomb over antibiotic resistance
  • GPs will be ordered to prescribe fewer antibiotics
  • Drug-resistant E-Coli could be responsible for 2,500 deaths
  • Cases of multidrug resistant tuberculosis rising
By Nick Mcdermott, Science Reporter
PUBLISHED: 23:00 GMT, 10 March 2013 | UPDATED: 23:33 GMT, 10 March 201

Growing threat: Infections like C. difficile are becoming increasingly difficult to treat as bugs become more resistant to antibiotics, leaving millions vulnerable
Growing threat: Infections like C. difficile are becoming increasingly difficult to treat as bugs become more resistant to antibiotics, leaving millions vulnerable
The rise of drug-resistant superbugs will drag the health service back ‘to the early 19th century’, Britain’s most senior medical adviser has warned.
Unless urgent action is taken, the ‘ticking timebomb’ of growing antibiotic resistance could leave millions vulnerable to untreatable bugs within a generation.
This could make even routine operations such as hip surgery deadly, said Chief Medical Officer Professor Dame Sally Davies.
In an attempt to tackle the problem, GPs will be ordered to prescribe fewer antibiotics.
While infections are becoming increasingly difficult to beat, no new class of antibiotic has been discovered since 1987. In contrast, a new infection emerges on an almost yearly basis.
Dame Sally said the ‘catastrophic threat’ from infections resistant to frontline antibiotics is so serious that she has asked the Government to put antibiotic resistance on the national risk register – ranking it alongside a large-scale terrorist attack or flu pandemic.
‘That is one way of getting central and cross-government action internationally,’ she said. ‘It should be [on the register] because this is a growing problem. And if we don’t get it right, we will find ourselves in a health system not dissimilar to the early 19th century at some point.
‘If we don’t act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can’t be treated by antibiotics. And routine operations like hip replacements or organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection.’
Acknowledging that ‘global action’ must be taken, she said: ‘This is an international threat.’
In the past five years, the number of cases of blood poisoning from antimicrobial resistant (AMR) forms of E. coli – which is twice as fatal as the normal bug – has gone up 60 per cent.
The drug-resistant gut bug alone, which is picked up in hospital in half of cases, could be responsible for up to 2,500 deaths in 2011 – more than MRSA and C. difficile combined.
And a deadly strain of tuberculosis which cannot be dealt with by most treatments has trebled in Britain in little over a decade.
Figures from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) show that instances of ‘multidrug resistant’ tuberculosis were 81 in 2011, up from just 28 in 2000, with around half of the patients dying.