An Abertay University professor has called for global action to tackle the growing threat from bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
Wilfred Otten was reacting to a warning last week from the UK’s chief medical officer that the country is facing a “catastrophic threat” to human health unless new drugs are developed.
Professor Dame Sally Davies said she wanted antibiotic resistance to be added to the national risk register of civil emergencies, putting it on a par with dangers such as terrorism.
The Government is preparing an antimicrobial resistance strategy which will set out a five-year strategy to address the issue.
However, Professor Otten believes that a solution does not lie with the pharmaceutical industry alone and instead calls for a combined approach addressing environmental and social factors too.
He said: “Society has become largely dependent on antibiotics and they have been one of the greatest success stories of modern medicine they have transformed, and indeed prolonged, our lives.
“However, bacteria are rapidly developing resistance to antibiotics and the length of time that antibiotics will remain effective has been pinned down to just a few decades.”
He said that most of the response to date had focused on the behavioural causes of antibiotic resistance.
Those being GPs prescribing anti-biotics for patients who do not necessarily need them and patients not completing the course of antibiotics they have been prescribed.
“But there is more to it than that. The natural environment, and how we interact with it, being key.
“Soil in particular plays an important role. Just one gramme of soil contains more bacteria than there are people on the planet, and these bacteria each naturally produce antibiotics to maintain a competitive edge over one another.
“By adding our own man-made antibiotics into the mix, the soil becomes the perfect breeding ground for new anti-biotic-resistant strains to arise, as proximity makes it easy for the bacteria to exchange genes which is how they evolve,” hesaid.
Professor Otten, who holds the chair of biophysics and soil ecosystems at Abertay, said antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the soil could enter the food chain in crops and end up mixing with bacteria in the gut, evolving again.
He warned that the drug industry itself was also contributing to the problem, especially in countries with large-scale manufacturing but lax regulations such as India and China.
Untreated wastewater from factories could contaminate rivers and fields.
“Although such places may seem far away and of no consequence to us here in the UK, we travel much more widely these days, which means these pathogens are constantly crossing continents and building resistance in new and complex ways,” he said.
“So there is more to combating this problem than simply hoping for behavioural change amongst individuals or the much needed development of new antibiotics and there are a great number of players in this game who need to take responsibility for helping to control the rise of antibiotic resistance in the environment.
“It is clear that if we take action in one area, but not another, it will do little to control antibiotic resistance because so many factors are interdependent.
“So we need to work collaboratively, and internationally, with people from many different disciplines and areas of expertise if we are to combat what has become a truly global antibiotic resistance crisis,” the professor said.