SuperbugsScientists: immediate action required to address superbugs’ threat
Scientists warn that drug-resistant superbugs demand an immediate, serious response and that the steps required to plan for these pathogens were not properly taken in previous decades. “[A] world without effective antibiotics would be ‘deadly,’ with routine surgery, treatments for cancer and diabetes and organ transplants becoming impossible,” says one scientist. The scientists warn that if action is not taken immediately, the massive health gains made since Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928 will be lost forever.
Scientists are warning that drug-resistant superbugs demand an immediate, serious response and that the steps required to plan for these pathogens were not properly taken in previous decades.
Driven by the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, the effects of resistance diseases would be profound. As the Huffington Post reports, “a world without effective antibiotics would be ‘deadly,’ with routine surgery, treatments for cancer and diabetes and organ transplants becoming impossible.” An example of such a threat is one of the most infamous superbugs, MRSA, which claims the lives of roughly 19,000 people each year in the United States— and a similar number in Europe — and which remains on the rise.
Jeremy Farrar, a director for the bio-tech funding group Wellcome Trust and co-author of a recent Nature article on the subject, said, “We have needed to take action against the development of antimicrobial resistance for more than 20 years. Despite repeated warnings, the international response has been feeble.”
Arguing that the World Health Organization (WHO) has missed chances to take the lead in regulation and research, it has been suggested by both Farrar and partner Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University’s Center for Immunity, Infection and Evolution, that a new regulatory body should be created and modeled on organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It would work with governments and other agencies which would implement its guidelines and recommendations.
Further, the two share a vision of the “Intergovernmental Panel on Antimicrobial Resistance” or IPAMR, which “would involve a broad range of experts, from specialist in clinical and veterinary medicine, to epidemiologists, microbiologists, pharmacologists, health economists and international lawyers.”
“We need independent, international leadership on this issue before the massive health gains that have been made since Alexander Fleming’s discovery…are lost forever,” Woolhouse warned, a reference to Fleming’s identification of penicillin in 1928.
— Read more in Mark Woolhouse and Jeremy Farrar, “Policy: An intergovernmental panel on antimicrobial resistance,” Nature 509 (29 May 2014): 555-57 (doi:10.1038/509555a)
