No antibiotics without a test, says report on rising antimicrobial resistance | Society | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/19/no-antibiotics-without-a-test-says-report-on-rising-antimicrobial-resis
A blueprint to end the scourge of antimicrobial resistance proposes that drug companies should foot the bill for the development of new antibiotics and that patients should not be able to get them without a test to ensure they are needed.
Economist Jim O’Neill, charged two years ago by David Cameron with finding answers to one of the most pressing problems in the world today, says the global financial cost of no action would be the loss of 10 million lives a year by 2050 and £69tn ($100tn) a year.
“One million people have died while we have been doing this review,” said Lord O’Neill, who became a minister while completing the report. Without action, he said, there would be more people dying in the future than are dying of cancer.
Many antibiotics that were once thought to have put an end to infectious disease are no longer working because the bugs have become resistant to them. Tuberculosis was thought to be no longer a killer because of antibiotics, but multi-drug resistant forms are exacting a death toll around the globe.
The two most eye-catching proposals advanced by O’Neill are:
• To force the pharmaceutical industry to “pay or play”. Drug companies must either research and develop new antibiotics or be prepared to fund other companies to do so. “We think there is a credible case for the pharmaceutical industry itself to pay, given how important antibiotics are for 7 billion people around the world,” he said.
• To ban doctors from prescribing antibiotics until they have carried out rapid tests to prove the infection is bacterial. “We must stop treating antibiotics like sweets, which is what we are doing around the world today,” he said. However, there must be incentives to develop such tests which do not yet exist.
