WHO: ‘Common infections will kill again’
pharmafile | May 1, 2014 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | AMR, WHO, global, infection, world health organization
The world is heading for a situation where common infections which have long been thought to be no threat to human health, may start to cause deaths on a massive scale.
This dramatic claim comes from the World Health Organization, which has released a report for the first time into antimicrobial resistance (AMR), including antibiotic resistance.
In short it says that antibiotic resistance – where bacteria mutate faster than antibiotics can keep up with the changes – is now “a major threat to public health” and has considerable implications for the cost of healthcare.
“Without urgent, co-ordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” says Dr Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s assistant director general for health security.
WHO wants pharma and policy-makers to foster innovation and R&D of new tools to tackle resistance, while making sure as much information as possible is shared.
“Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating,” Fukuda adds.
The problem has long been recognised: last year GlaxoSmithKline announced it was to receive up to $200 million from the US government to develop new antibiotics, as worries grew over the increasing threat of AMR.
But it is significant that the WHO is now saying publicly that the problem is “happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country”.
Its report, ‘Antimicrobial resistance: global report on surveillance’, focusses on antibiotic resistance in seven different bacteria responsible for common and serious diseases: such as bloodstream infections (sepsis), diarrhoea, pneumonia, urinary tract infections and gonorrhoea.
The threat of infection from bacterial infections such as MRSA is well-known, with programmes such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative putting £180 million into public-private partnerships to finding new antibiotics.
But the WHO report on 114 countries found that resistance to the treatment of last resort for life-threatening infections caused by common intestinal bacteria, Klebsiella pneumonia is now found everywhere in the world.
By the same token, resistance to one of the most widely used antibacterial medicines for the treatment of urinary tract infections caused by E. coli is ‘very widespread’ – yet resistance was virtually zero when the drugs were first introduced in the 1980s.
Similar treatment failures for gonorrhoea have been confirmed in Austria, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Norway, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden and the UK – and more than one million people are infected with gonorrhoea every day, WHO says.
Adam Hill
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