Bad news coming from Europe in the fight against the little microbes:
Superbugs capable of evading even the most powerful antibiotics are increasing their grip in Europe with rates of drug resistance in one type of bacteria reaching 50 percent in the worst-hit countries, health officials said Thursday.
In a report on multi-drug resistant bacteria, or so-called superbugs, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which monitors disease across the European Union, said the need to combat resistance was “critical.”
[…] K. pneumoniae is a common cause of pneumonia, urinary tract, and bloodstream infections in hospital patients. The superbug form is resistant even to a class of medicines called carbapenems, the most powerful known antibiotics, which are usually reserved by doctors as a last line of defense.
[…] To a large extent, antibiotic resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them.
Experts say primary care doctors are partly to blame for prescribing antibiotics for patients who demand them unnecessarily, and hospitals are also guilty of overuse.
“Fifty percent of all antibiotic use in hospitals can be inappropriate,” the ECDC said, urging far more prudent use.
At the same time, there are few new antibiotic drugs on the horizon and experts are worried that only a few big drug firms, such as GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, still have strong antibiotic research and development programs.
There is little commercial incentive to invest in new drugs that may be held in reserve as last-line weapons.
Sprenger said the report found that the countries with the highest rates of multi-drug resistant infections, such as Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria, also tended to be the ones with the highest use of antibiotics.
“In general what you see is that high resistance goes hand in hand with high consumption,” he said.
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