World to face risk as drug-resistant bacteria outpace medical advances

The world faces a "window of vulnerability" within a few years, during which none of the current generation of antibiotics will work against increasingly drug-resistant bacteria.

Researchers are therefore studying new ways to attack disease-causing germs to keep common infections from becoming killers. Many of the most common bacteria have become potentially dangerous because they were no longer destroyed by existing antibiotics, said Dr George Poste, of SmithKline Beecham, who yesterday addressed delegates at the British Association for the Advancement of Science's Festival of Science, taking place in Sheffield.

He said resistance to an individual drug was bad but many bacteria were now becoming multi-drug resistant, making it more difficult to control infections. This was a matter of particular concern in hospitals, where already weakened patients risked infection with germs such as staphylococcus.

He said there were numerous reports of bacteria which had developed resistance to what was perceived to be our last line of defence, an antibiotic called vancomycin. "The big worry are the vancomycin-resistant strains."

All of the drug companies were working to develop new therapies but it would take years before these products were available. A "window of vulnerability" could develop between 2002 and 2007 during which resistant strains would win out against existing drugs and before the new ones became available.

Dr Martin Westwell, of the University of Oxford, described a potential new way to counter bacterial infections using bacteriophages, a type of virus which attacks bacteria. While we were tending to lose the "arms race" in the fight against bacteria, the bacteriophages mutated faster and so were able to keep up with changes in bacteria.

He said the first case of a person whose life was saved by use of bacteriophages occurred recently. The Canadian woman had a multidrug-resistant bacterial infection which could be cleared only using this approach. Bacteriophages had been studied for some time in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and the approach was examined in the West but disregarded decades ago because of the very success of antibiotics. Scientists were taking a fresh look because of the resistance problem.

He said while bacteriophages were not a complete answer, they could help fill the gap until new antibiotics come on stream.