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World Antibiotic Awareness Week

November 14, 2018

World Antibiotic Awareness Week continues this week. On Monday we covered how antibiotics save lives, but we haven’t developed new antibiotics in the last 30 years.

Today we look at antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance is an everyday problem in all healthcare settings across England and Europe.

The spread of resistant bacteria in hospitals or community healthcare settings is a major issue for patient safety:

  • Infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria increase levels of disease and death, as well as the length of time people stay in hospitals.
  • Inappropriate use of antibiotics may increasingly cause patients to become colonised or infected with resistant bacteria.
  • Few new antibiotics are being developed. As resistance in bacteria grows, it will become more difficult to treat infection, and this affects patient care.

New research, published earlier this month, shows that 33,300 patients die each year due to antibiotic resistant infections in Europe.

If we don’t change how we prescribe and use antibiotics, by 2050 there will be an extra 10 million deaths each year due to resistant infections, with an associated economic cost of £66 trillion.