AMR: Meeting the challenge

Imagine a world where what today may be the most common and routine of operations are made all but impossible without a severe risk of death from infection. Where hip replacements, caesarean sections and bone repair are no longer viable and we are cast back 100 years to a time before antibiotics. It is a worrying thought, but in the modern world, such fears are becoming a real possibility that we must confront, as a result of the growing resistance of bacteria to our most commonly-used antibiotics.

As the World Health Organisation (WHO) acknowledged in 2014, this is not a problem for the future, but for the present, and already the effects can be observed. In the European Union (plus Norway and Iceland), between five and 12% of hospital patients acquire an infection during their stay, and 25,000 people die each year from infections caused by bacteria resistant to antimicrobials. The trend is towards an increase in these figures worldwide unless action is taken.

The recent UK government review, chaired by Lord O’Neill, on the antibiotic resistance challenge, paints it as not only a health, but also an economic threat. The report is full of alarming statistics on the potential impact of antibiotic resistant infection, not least that it could cause numbers of deaths exceeding those caused by cancer by 2050, and cost the global economy $100 trillion through healthcare costs and lost productivity. Bacterial resistance already costs the US healthcare system more than $20 billion per year, and causes some eight million extra hospital days.