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 per cent in the worst-hit countries, health officials said yesterday.
In a report on multidrug-resistant bacteria, or “superbugs”, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, which monitors disease across the EU, said the need to combat resistance was “critical”. “We need to declare a war – a war against these bacteria,” the centre’s director Marc Sprenger said. “If we don’t . . . we’ll get lots of infections and many vulnerable patients will become severely ill, and we don’t have the antibiotics to treat them.”
Mr Sprenger said that, across the region, rates of resistance to last-line antibiotics by a bacteria called Klebsiella pneumoniae had more than doubled to 15 per cent by 2010 from about 7 per cent five years ago. “What’s even more worrying is that there’s a great diversity among different countries in Europe – and some countries have resistance of almost 50 per cent.”
K. pneumoniae is a common cause of pneumonia, urinary tract and bloodstream infections in hospital patients. The superbug form is resistant even to carbapenems, the most powerful known antibiotics, which are usually reserved by doctors as a last line of defence.
The centre said several EU member states were now reporting that 15-50 per cent of K pneumoniae from bloodstream infections were resistant to carbapenems. To a large extent, antibiotic resistance is driven by the misuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them.
Experts say doctors are partly to blame for prescribing antibiotics for patients unnecessarily, and hospitals are guilty of overuse. “Fifty per cent of all antibiotic use in hospitals can be inappropriate,” the centre said. – (Reuters)