'Superbugs' thrive on antibiotics

LONDON - The World Health Organisation has issued a stark warning about the rise of drug-resistant diseases that threaten to return medicine to the dark days before the discovery of penicillin.

In a report on the rise of antibiotic resistance, the organisation says that the world has about a decade to ensure that our grandchildren do not face the same childhood diseases that terrorised our grandparents.

The global spread of antibiotic resistance is occurring because of the overuse of anti-microbial drugs by industrialised countries and the underuse of them by the developing world, says the report "Overcoming Microbial Resistance."

The window of opportunity to combat the threat is closing.

"Before long, we may have forever missed our opportunity to control and eventually eliminate the most dangerous infectious diseases," the report says.

"Indeed, if we fail to make rapid progress during this decade, it may become very difficult and expensive - if not impossible - to do so later. We need to make effective use of the tools we have now."

Sixty per cent of the infections picked up while patients are in hospital are now drug-resistant.

It is only a matter of time before the multiple-resistant forms of the most dangerous microbes become resistant to the last effective antibiotic - vancomycin.

Many lifesaving medicines are now of little use because of potentially fatal microbes - from intestinal infections to tuberculosis - acquiring genes that make them immune to the most powerful drugs.

"Microbial resistance to treatment could bring the world back to a pre-antibiotic age ... Drug resistance is the most telling sign that we have failed to take the threat of infectious diseases seriously."

In the countries of the former Soviet Union, for instance, drugresistant TB is rife, with one in 10 patients suffering from strains that can resist treatment with two of the most effective anti-TB drugs.

About 30 per cent of hepatitis B cases in Thailand are resistant to the primary drug used to treat the disease.

In India, 60 per cent of patients with leishmaniasis (a parasite-borne disease) are drug-resistant, as are 98 per cent of patients suffering gonorrhoea.

- INDEPENDENT