Antibiotics resistance 'as big a risk as terrorism'

Fergus Walsh in BBC News: The danger posed by growing resistance to antibiotics should be ranked along with terrorism on a list of threats to the nation, the government's chief medical officer for England has said. Professor Dame Sally Davies described it as a "ticking time bomb".

She warned that routine operations could become deadly in just 20 years if we lose the ability to fight infection. Dame Sally urged the government to raise the issue during next month's G8 Summit in London.

Dame Sally said: "If we don't take action, then we may all be back in an almost 19th Century environment where infections kill us as a result of routine operations. We won't be able to do a lot of our cancer treatments or organ transplants."

She said pharmaceutical companies needed to be encouraged to develop new drugs, because the manufacture of antibiotics was not viewed as profitable. "We haven't had a new class of antibiotics since the late 80s and there are very few antibiotics in the pipeline of the big pharmaceutical companies that develop and make drugs," she said.

"We haven't as a society globally incentivised making antibiotics. It's quite simple - if they make something to treat high blood pressure or diabetes and it works, we will use it on our patients everyday "Whereas antibiotics will only be used for a week or two when they're needed, and then they have a limited life span because of resistance developing anyway."...

Bacteria on an agar plate, shot by HansN., Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license