The end of antibiotics?

We’ll have to treat sick with fresh air and sunshine, says health chief

THE country is on the brink of a ‘post-antibiotic’ era in which infections will only be cured by fresh air and sunshine, the chief medical officer has warned.

Dame Sally Davies is particularly worried about the spread of untreatable strains of gonorrhoea which are already on the rise in some areas of the country.

She is also concerned about the emergence of resistant forms of TB which are not responding to antibiotics.

These deadly infections ‘know no borders’, she warned, and can easily be flown in from Asia or North America.

She said that if the spread of drug-resistant bacteria continues, they will claim more than 10million lives globally by 2050. The resistant bugs have emerged after decades of over-use of antibiotics and have mutated to become resistant to them.

Last year former chancellor George Osborne warned they posed a greater threat to mankind than cancer.

Addressing a health conference in central London, Dame Sally said: ‘I’m actually rather worried that if we don’t win this battle against drug-resistant infections, we’re going to be back to fresh air, sunshine and hygiene. We are risking losing modern miracles.’

‘Bugs know no borders. In London because of Heathrow we are closer to Hong Kong and JFK airport (in New York) than we are to Birmingham and Glasgow.’ She pointed to

‘Mercury and iodine’

recent outbreaks of ‘supergonorrhoea’ in London, the South East and the Midlands.

The strain does not respond to the normal course of antibiotics so doctors have resorted to using two combined drugs. But the bacteria appears to be developing a resistance to these two, and there are limited alternatives.

She said if the strains do eventually become resistant to all antibiotics, ‘we are going to have to go to the old-fashioned treatments which sound really nasty. You could do urethral irrigation when they used to put mercury and iodine into the bladder to wash out the germs’.

‘Or you could try getting into a hotbox and getting heated to 43 degrees in the hope that would kill off the disease.’

She added: ‘In 1932 children with tuberculosis were treated with fresh air and sunshine – it was the best possible treat- ment. We will probably be all right but our grandchildren won’t if we don’t take action.

‘At a conservative estimate it’s currently claiming 25,000 lives in Europe every year. That’s the same as a Boeing 747 crashing each week.

‘But if it was a Boeing crashing each week we would hear about it.’

The rise of resistant bacteria has been partly blamed on GPs handing out antibiotics too often. Doctors have been told to reduce their use – and last year, prescriptions for them fell 7 per cent.

There were 34.3 million prescriptions in 2015/16, down from 37 million in 2014/15.