SCOTLAND’S SUPERBUG NIGHTMARE
Surge in patients infected during routine operations
SCOTLAND faces a deadly superbug crisis because doctors are handing out too many antibiotics, experts warned last night.
A Scottish Government health adviser claimed some routine operations such as hip replacements could become so risky that up to 80 per cent of patients who develop an infection could die.
Overuse of antibiotics has resulted in some types of bacteria becoming resistant, meaning conditions that were once easy to treat have become deadly.
Professor Alistair Leanord, an adviser to the Government on hospital-acquired infections, said antibiotic prescriptions were three times higher than the level recommended to prevent the rise of killer infections.
And patients are regularly becoming infected with bugs that prove ever harder to treat.
Consultant microbiologist Professor Leanord said: ‘People are getting sicker, they are getting older and we’re having to use more
antibiotics just to stand still.’ Experts say there should be no more than 250 antibiotic prescriptions per 1,000 people per year.
But the rate in Scotland is 700, more than double the 300 recorded in both Sweden and the Netherlands.
Professor Leanord said: ‘We are twice the best in Europe, and we’re almost three times what experts say we should be. We’re not even close.’
Speaking at a Holyrood conference on infection prevention and control this week, he warned that Scottish hospitals also used more antibiotics than the other nations in the United Kingdom.
Antibiotic-resistant infections are predicted to be the biggest cause of death globally by 2050.
In Scotland in 2015, 188 deaths were attributed to superbugs – 18 more than in 2014, a 10 per cent increase.
Common bugs are Clostridium difficile (C.diff) and E.coli. Cases of Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) have dropped in recent years but the infection was responsible for the deaths of 31 Scots in 2015.
Professor Leanord, who works at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, said that an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant infection in the UK could wipe out tens of thousands of people. And he claimed that around 1,000 tons of antibiotics are used in the UK every year, with around half used on animals.
‘A thousand tons of bricks isn’t that much but this is 1,000 tons of drugs that we will use in milligram quantities – so that’s a lot of drugs,’ he added.
No antibiotics have been developed in at least the past decade, and big pharmaceutical firms are not going to be able to come up with a new drug to solve the problem.
Professor Leanord cited the case of a patient in Italy who had a hip replacement in 2010 and died from infection three days later despite being given nearly every antibiotic available.
‘Five years ago I couldn’t say this, but we see antibiotic profiles that look like this now in the Queen Elizabeth [hospital] probably a couple of times a month,’ he said. ‘We’re stopping the potential to perform modern medicine as we know it. If you get one of these organisms, the mortality rate goes to 80 per cent.
‘We cannot have a conversation with people saying, “If you have an infection, you’ve got an 80 per cent chance of dying from it”. That is not a conversation that we have had in the last 40 years, but it might be a conversation that we have in the future.’
He added: ‘We will never reduce resistance [to antibiotics] but our mantra should be, “How do we stop it increasing?”.’
The Scottish Government said: ‘Since 2007 we have achieved significant reductions in healthcareassociated infections, in part due to improved use of antibiotics.
‘Last year we published our fiveyear strategic framework to contain antimicrobial resistance and control healthcare-associated infections and £4.2million is being invested in a research project into antibiotic resistance.’