Siouxsie Wiles: Lack of research can seriously damage our health

There are a wealth of talented scientists who can tackle the problem. Photo / Getty Images

Life as we know it could end in as little as 10 years if we don't start taking drastic action.

This is the message to come out of a report released last week by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in its first look at global resistance to antibiotics.

Antibiotics are arguably one of the most important discoveries in medical history. In antibiotics we are exploiting the weapons produced as the result of an arms race that has existed between microbes for millennia. The first antibiotic was used to treat people in 1937 and it didn't take long before the flipside of the antibiotic coin became apparent - that microbes can easily become resistant to these wonder drugs.

In fact, microbial resistance to penicillin was known before the antibiotic even came into clinical use. Latest estimates put the number of potential antibiotic resistance genes harboured by microbes at more than 20,000.

What has made our predicament inevitable is that microbes have many ways in which they can share resistance genes among themselves, so that even those microbes who have never encountered a particular antibiotic can still be resistant to it.

The WHO report finds that antibiotic- resistant superbugs are present in every region of the world and that many countries lack even the basic systems to track and monitor these deadly microbes. It also calls for drastic action to avert a return to the pre-antibiotic era, where routine surgery becomes life-threateningly risky and common infections will no longer be treatable.

Some patients are already in this situation, with untreatable strains of the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, pneumonia, and many other infections.

In the aftermath of the WHO report, much of the discussion in the media has focused on what people can do to help conserve our crop of antibiotics: refraining from demanding antibiotics when they are unnecessary, completing any antibiotic course they are prescribed and ensuring that they and their families are vaccinated.

It is important to remember, though, that antibiotics are not just prescribed to people but to animals, too, in veterinary practice and in farming. People can also make choices about how the meat they eat has been produced. Were the animals battery reared using antibiotics? At a personal level, you could consider doing your next charity run to raise money for infectious diseases research, instead of cancer.

But will all these measures avert the antibiotic crisis? In my opinion, no. To stay ahead of this "microbial apocalypse" we need new antibiotics, more vaccines and novel ways to tackle infectious microbes. And I don't mean hand-waving, magic water (homoeopathy) and other complementary/alternative "medicines". We need governments and industry to incentivise and invest in scientific research into infectious diseases, a call also made in the WHO report.

It is not enough to think that we can rely on the rest of the world to shoulder this burden. While rates of hospitalisations from infectious diseases are falling in other developed countries, in New Zealand they have risen 50 per cent over the past two decades.

This country has a wealth of talented scientists who are ready to tackle this problem but need the resources to do so. We also have a unique and diverse flora and fauna that is a rich seam to mine for novel antimicrobials. Kiwis need to let their politicians know that they want their tax dollars to be invested in tackling infectious diseases research.

Dr Siouxsie Wiles is a microbiologist and senior research fellow at the University of Auckland where she runs the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab.