Greece Outside In: Antibiotics and drug resistance: how do we compare?

Monday, March 11, 2013

Antibiotics and drug resistance: how do we compare?

The Chief Medical Officer has warned of the rise of superbugs with a growing resistance to antibiotics. How many do we take and which countries take the most?
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Antibiotics were the twentieth century's miracles - ever since Ian Fleming discovered Penicillin, we have got in the habit of popping them every time we get a cold. But that habit could be coming back to bite us: the UK's Chief Medical Officer has warned that

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria with the potential to cause untreatable infections pose "a catastrophic threat" to the population

The annual report out today finds that

While a new infectious disease has been discovered nearly every year over the past 30 years, there have been very few new antibiotics developed leaving our armoury nearly empty as diseases evolve and become resistant to existing drugs

It has become an issue around the world. The World Health Organisation reckons antibiotic-resistant infections cost the EU €1.5bn and the US some $30bn a year. Meanwhile in Russia, 83.6% of families routinely use them. Antibiotic resistant strains have even been found in Antarctica.

So, how many antibiotics do we take in the UK - and how does it compare to other countries?

The best source for this information is the European Centre for Disease Prevention & Control, which compares countries with data from 2010, the latest year available.

It shows how in the UK, every day, there are 18.7 doses of anitbiotics for every 1,000 people. That may sound like a lot but it places us at the lower end of the European scale, where France, Greece and Spain use a lot more, often being able to get antibiotics over the counter.

UK use has stayed remarkably steady too, according to the data which shows a slight rise over time.

Meanwhile, case of E.Coli resistant to the main antibiotics used to fight them have risen too - with a slight decrease recently.

But which antibiotics do we use? In the UK, we are more likely to use tetracycline, although the top one is penicillins in both the UK and France - which date back to the 1920s.

The big fear for scientists is less the growing resistance to existing antibiotics - it's what bacteria does, after all - but the lack of new antibiotics. There hasn't been a new one since 1987, while there are new diseases and superbugs developing all the time.