We are on the verge of a post-antibiotic era
▶ A world without these drugs will be a world in which common infections can kill
The WHO recently published a new report warning that the world is now running out of antibiotics. That means we are on the verge of a post-antibiotic era. Antibiotics are developed from molecules produced by bacteria and fungi that are toxic to other bacteria. Ever since Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in a mould that destroyed bacteria growing in a culture plate in his lab in 1928, millions of lives have been saved by antibiotics. But antibiotic therapy has always been vulnerable to resistance. A few bacteria that are genetically resistant to antibiotics survive in human bodies even after treatment has wiped out virtually all the disease-causing bacteria. The survivors then transfer their biological invulnerability to their own species and to others, spawning a bacteria capable of resisting, at its most tenacious, the whole gamut of antibiotic drugs in human hands.
The multiplication of multiple-drug resistant bacteria is the product of overuse of antibiotics: the threat of extinction activates genetic countermeasures in the bacteria. Overexposure to drugs is turning our bodies into factories of drug-resistant killers. Consider a disturbing case study released by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this year of an elderly woman who checked into a hospital in Nevada with a bacterial infection. The bug she was carrying was resistant to 26 different antibiotics, virtually everything in the arsenal of the medical team treating her, and she died a few weeks later of septic shock. In India, the over-prescription of antibiotics, coupled with poor sanitation, has caused a proliferation of multiple-drug resistant micro-organisms.
Pharmaceutical innovation has plummeted at the time when it’s most needed. Only two new classes of antibiotics have appeared in the past three decades. This is because drug companies do not want to invest in the production of medicines that will have commercial utility only after others in their class have become fully obsolete. Non-profit organisations are attempting to plug the void created by the gradual exit of Big Pharma. The charitable health foundation, Wellcome, has been joined by the governments of Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland and Britain in a pledge to contribute €56 million (Dh246.4 million) to the WHO’s efforts to develop new antibiotics. To say that this sum is not commensurate to the threat the world faces would be an understatement. A world without antibiotics will be a world in which tuberculosis will re-emerge as a mass killer, routine surgeries will carry the risk of potential death and urinary tract infections will become hard to treat. There are many causes that demand the world’s attention. But the pace at which we are entering a post-antibiotic era calls for urgent coordinated global action.