Patients who have infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria generally have increased risk of worse clinical outcomes than those where the bacteria are not resistant. Antibiotics have significantly reduced deaths from common infections. For example, less than one in 100 young and otherwise healthy people now die from community-acquired pneumonia and skin infections in comparison to the 10 in every 100 people who died before antibiotics were discovered.

If antibiotics are lost, society risks returning to the days when those infections now regarded as trivial become fatal again. An infected cut could be life-threatening and an illness like pneumonia would again become a mass killer.

According to a paper published in 2016 as part of the UK’s Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, if drug resistant infections are not tackled now, they could kill an extra 10 million people across the world each year by 2050.

Governments and pharmaceutical companies are considering ways to increase the discovery of new antibiotics. The final report of the AMR review, ‘Tackling drug-resistant infections globally: final report and recommendations’, outlines ways in which antimicrobial resistance can be tackled.

Focus on maintaining efficacy

In the meantime the focus is on ensuring the antibiotics currently in existence remain effective, since no new class of antibiotics has been discovered for the past 30 years. Even if new classes are found, simply replacing old antibiotics with new ones is not the solution as they could also become ineffective if they are not used judiciously.

Without effective antibiotics, medical practices could actually lead to many more deaths. Cancer chemotherapy, transplants and surgery all rely on the availability of effective antibiotics, while there are new gonorrhoea strains which are resistant to ‘last line’ antibiotics for the infection. According to WHO, such treatment failure has occurred in 10 countries including the UK.

Antibiotic resistance is not a distant threat, but one of the most dangerous patient safety and global crises facing the world today. A meta-analysis has highlighted that the risk of resistance persists for at least 12 months in individuals after each intake of an antibiotic (see below).

Increased risk of resistant organism

UTI 5 studies: n = 14,348
Antibiotics in the past 2 months: 2.5 times
Antibiotics in the past 12 months: 1.33 times

RTI 7 studies: n = 2,605
Antibiotics in the past 2 months: 2.4 times
Antibiotics in the past 12 months: 2.4 times