‘Drug-resistant germs threaten world health’

UNITED Nations officials are warning that the human dumping of antibiotics and chemicals on land and at sea is creating a new breed of drug-resistant germs.

As a result, people are at an ever-heightening risk of contracting incurable diseases, a report says.

“Around the world, discharge from municipal, agricultural and industrial waste in the environment means it is common to find antibiotic concentrations in rivers, sediments and soils,” the study warns.

“It is steadily driving the evolution of resistant bacteria. A drug that once protected our health is now in danger of very quietly destroying it.” The report, Frontiers 2017, was published at the UN Environment Assembly.

Health watchdogs are already deeply worried about the dwindling armoury of weapons against germs.

A report in 2014 warned that drug-resistant infections could kill 10 million people a year by 2050, making it a bigger cause of death than heart disease or cancer. It is known that bacteria acquire drug resistance partly by exposure to antibiotics.

“We may enter a post-antibiotic era when infection … will become very difficult, if not impossible to treat,” said Will Gaze of Exeter University, the report’s co-author.