Antibiotics may be useless in a Decade

TARA WOMERSLEY HEALTH CORRESPONDENT

ANTIBIOTICS could be rendered useless in little over a decade because over-prescription is leading to increased resistance from disease, a leading expert has warned.

Prof Hugh McGavock, a specialist in prescribing science, has claimed that an antibiotic crisis could lead to thousands of people dying from previously treatable illnesses by 2015.

He said bacteria resistance to antibiotics is not just due to doctors prescribing them unnecessarily but also due to the use of antibiotics in the farming industry over the past 50 years.

Prof McGavock, from the University of Ulster, said that increasing resistance to such drugs could lead to surgical procedures being stopped because the antibiotics needed will be rendered useless. He added that, while many patients may be prescribed antibiotics when they do not need them, they also exacerbate the problem by failing to take their medications correctly.

This means that, because the course of antibiotics is not completed, killing off the bacteria, the bacteria are able to build up a resistance to it.

He said: "In the limited time available during the average eight-minute NHS GP consultation, there is very little opportunity to negotiate concordance, but all GPs should be aware of the extent of the problem, of the known causes of non-compliance, and how compliance may be improved."

He told the BBC that the crisis of increasing antibiotic resistance could be as big as AIDS and referred to the problems already posed by the MRSA superbug in hospitals, which can prove fatal particularly for those with impaired immune systems.

However, another expert, Professor Hugh Pennington, the head of bacteriology at Aberdeen University, said that he believed such predictions were "rather pessimistic".

He said: "The problem for GPs is that antibiotics are very effective drugs, and they do not have the time or resources to carry out laboratory tests to ensure whether they would be appropriate.

"So they are faced with a quandary, because it may be negligent not to give a patient antibiotics and they need to balance the needs of the individual against the universal situation.

"There is also the problem that patients do not take the drugs as prescribed. If they stop taking them early, the antibiotic will not have killed off all the bacteria, so the bacteria then build up a resistance to it.

"We have already seen some strains of TB that are resistant to drugs, although this has not happened in big cases in the UK, but this has meant going back to surgery which was the treatment provided in the 1930s. One way to prevent this resistance is direct observed therapy, ensuring the patients take the drugs properly, but this is expensive."

He added that resistance of MRSA to antibiotics meant that there was only one standard drug, vancomycin, to treat it.

But he said of Prof McGovack’s outlook on the future: "I have a more optimistic prediction and have a feeling that in the next five to ten years we will be keeping things under control. I believe that hygiene and hand-washing will have an effect on MRSA."

Jim Eadie, the director of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, Scotland: said: "There are clearly challenges, which all of us need to take seriously.

"The ability to treat and prevent bacterial disease has been one of the major medical advances in the last century. Obviously, there is concern that the ability to treat common infections will be more difficult in the future due to antibiotic resistance.

"Appropriate prescribing, good patient compliance in medicine taking and further research by the pharmaceutical industry to discover and develop new anti-infectives all have a part to play in tackling this problem. For its part the pharmaceutical industry is helping to discover new antibiotics and vaccines.

These new treatments will be able to treat those conditions that are currently proving difficult to treat and the industry is investing huge sums of money in finding solutions."

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=1077142003