Drug-resistant bacteria threatens the way medicine has developed, a new approach is required

With the emergence of superbugs that are drug-resistant, a number of medical procedures and routine operations might turn out to be deadly.

However, not using antibiotics will, in turn, have deadly consequences for people who are living in some of the poorest regions of the world and are susceptible to bacterial infections.

One such example of this phenomenon is the prevalence of infections that are are resistant to the antibiotic ‘carbapenem’ throughout hospitals in Europe and is used as a last line of defense to counter Acinetobacter infections that spread in heathcare facilities as well as hospitals.

To support this conclusion, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) recently compiled data that eight out of 18 countries are struggling to cope with the spread of this infection with numbers of those being infected going above 25 percent.

Worse still, 17 out of 38 EU countries have not been able to provide guidance as to how hospitals can stop the spread of this infection either.

Experts believe that this phenomenon of antibiotic resistance is complex but without a doubt will affect just about everybody in the world.

One of the key reasons why this resistance to bacteria has emerged is because of not only the overuse of antibiotics in medicine but also in agriculture as well. Yet the problem has amplified due to the fact that pharmaceutical companies are unable to develop new drugs as a result.

And Otto Cars, a medical researcher from the Uppsala University in Sweden, describes the situation best, in saying, “Only now has the awareness and urgency of the problem of antibiotic resistance reached a level that a new sustainable global system to counteract these problems can be built. Addressing these problems will require nothing less than a fundamental shift in how antibiotics are developed, financed, and prescribed.”