This week marks World Antibiotics Awareness Week. Over the past 60 years we have come to take antibiotics for granted, treating them as a universal cure-all and taking them more often than might be necessary.
However, we are now paying the price for the overuse and misguided prescription of antibiotics, because so many bacterial infections have developed a resistance to them. Such is the threat to the world’s population from antibiotic resistance that the G8 has classified it alongside terrorism.
The recent Review on Antimicrobial Resistance estimates that by 2050 the global cost of antibiotic resistance will rise to £100 trillion and account for an extra 10 million deaths a year.
But it is not just over-prescription which is causing the problem – no new forms of antibiotics have been created for 30 years. As a consequence, health services across the world are struggling to contain bacterial diseases as the antibiotic arsenal available to them dwindles in effectiveness.
A world without antibiotics is a terrifying one – there would be no more safe routine surgery; a simple scratch could lead to serious infection or death; and bacterial diseases which until now we have had under control could rip through the human population.
This week Public Health England, in collaboration with Department of Health’s Expert Advisory Committee on Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infections (ARHAI) and other bodies, has launched the Antibiotic Guardian campaign where those in health care, students and educators and members of the public are being asked to make at least one pledge towards ending the inappropriate use of antibiotics.
At Plymouth University we are contributing to the battle against resistance by developing a new family of antibiotics. We are developing epidermicin, a new antimicrobial agent, to the point where it can be trialled in humans to prevent diseases such as MRSA through use as a nasal spray.
In addition, and to test its effectiveness for treating other antibiotic resistant bacteria, we are investigating how epidermicin in ointment form performs in treating superficial skin infection. We are also investigating how epidermicin works, and will look at how it can be most effectively and safely produced to the scale at which it will be needed.
As will be the case for any new antibiotic, there will have to be precise guidelines for health services about how and when epidermicin can and should be used – moving away from the ‘scatter gun’ approach used previously to prescribing antibiotics more rationally with more targeted methods.
What needs to be done to tackle the global crisis in antibiotics?
As well as developing new antibiotics, we need to be more careful about how we use the ones we have, according to a University academic
