Ara Darzi on why antibiotic resistance could be deadlier than cancer

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. I HAVE SPENT much of my career at St Mary’s Hospital, in London, a short walk from the laboratory where in 1928 Sir Alexander Fleming made his epoch-defining discovery of penicillin, the first antibiotic. Millions of lives have been saved since and the drugs were once thought to have put an end to infectious disease.

But that dream has died as bacteria resistant to antibiotics have grown and multiplied. Today untreatable infections, for which there is no antibiotic, cause more than 1m deaths a year worldwide, a toll projected to rise ten-fold by 2050, surpassing all deaths from cancer. Radical action is needed.

For only the second time in its history, the UN General Assembly will meet this week to address this global threat and protect humanity from falling into a post-antimicrobial era in which simple infections kill and routine surgery becomes too risky to perform. A key problem is that antibiotics are too casually prescribed to people, and too widely used in animal agriculture. This happens because they are cheap and have few immediately harmful effects.

I believe we must set a bold new target: by 2030 no antibiotic should be prescribed without a proper diagnosis that identifies the underlying cause as bacterial infection. This is an ambitious goal which will require unprecedented co-operation, significant investment in diagnostic technologies and a fundamental shift in prescribing practices worldwide, including affordable diagnostics and support from richer countries for poorer ones. There will be exceptions, such as suspected sepsis which can be life-threatening, where treatment must begin immediately.