NHS ‘covering-up toll of deadly superbugs’

THE NHS is hiding the scale of drugresistant superbugs because hospitals are not admitting when patients die from them, the chief medical officer has said. Dame Sally Davies told MPS that relatives are often left in ignorance as to the real cause of their loved-one’s death because acknowledging that anti-microbial resistance (AMR) played a role would look bad for the health service.

AMR, where previously treatable infections become immune to antibiotics, has been identified as the single gravest threat to modern medicine and is thought to kill around 5,000 people a year in England.

Inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics is the main cause, exacerbated by the failure of the pharmaceutical industry to invent a new class of drug since the Eighties.

However, Dame Sally last night told the health and social care select committee that some hospitals are hampering efforts to crack down on the threat.

“One of the problems at the moment is families often don’t know that their bereavement was due to infection, and they’re rarely told that the infection was resistant to treatment because it looks as if the NHS if failing,” she said. “We kind of shy away telling that last bit of it.”

Dame Sally called for a change in the rules so that infection and resistance to drugs are routinely included as causes of death on death certificates. “That would really wake people up to the deaths as they happen,” she said.

Forecasts have predicted that, in the absence of drastic action, by 2050 drug-resistant infections are projected to cause 10million deaths a year.

The Government has a target to reduce the inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics by 50 per cent by 2020 and data shows there has been some progress, with a nine per cent reduction in the human consumption of antibiotics in England since 2012.

However, experts believe the NHS could be doing far more to reduce prescribing. Prof Michael Moore, a primary care specialist, told the committee that despite being introduced more than three years ago, doctors were “simply not following” official guidance to help prevent inappropriate prescribing in cases of suspected pneumonia.