Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron is raising alarm over
antibiotic resistance and has asked the seven leading nations of the Western
World, including Canada and the United States, to take action.
If the problem is not brought under control, antimicrobial
resistance could kill an extra 10 million people a year by 2050, according to a
recent British scientific review.
Cameron said at a recent meeting of the G7 nations in Japan
that countries need to deal with the challenge by reducing antibiotic use and
rewarding drug companies for developing new medicines.
In the United States his week, scientists found that a
49-year-old Pennsylvania woman was infected by bacteria that are resistant to
all antibiotics, including colistin which is held in reserve to tackle
“nightmare” bacteria.
The same bacteria has been identified in Canadian patients.
“In too many cases antibiotics have stopped working,”
Cameron said.
“That means people are dying of simple infections or
conditions like TB (tuberculosis), tetanus, sepsis, infections that should not
mean a death sentence,” he told a news conference at a summit in Japan.
“If we do nothing about this there will be a cumulative hit
to the world economy of $100 trillion and it is potentially the end of modern
medicine as we know it,” he said.
The livestock and poultry industries are beginning to be
more serious about eliminating the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics.
Antibiotic-free chicken is now a specialty market and some
are advertising that their meat is derived from hogs and cattle that have not
been raised with the help of antibiotics.
Drug makers have stopped marketing antibiotics as growth
promotants, but in many cases they continue to be used in the same fashion for “disease
prevention”.
