€1m prize to help cut antibiotic use

More than half of EU citizens still believe they need antibiotics to cure them when they have the common cold or flu.

They don’t know that overuse of antibiotics is in fact making them obsolete — killing one of the best defences humankind has against major killers like TB that is coming back.

Now the problem has got so bad that about 25,000 people die every year in the EU because they become ill from bacteria that has become immune to drugs.

And another 4m get infections from hospitals and clinics annually. All in all they are estimated to cost €1.5bn a year in the EU alone in additional healthcare and time out of work.

However, people continue to demand antibiotics from their doctors, and in many cases the medical profession cannot be sure if an illness is caused by bacteria or a virus — or a mixture of both.

As part of a multi million action plan to raise awareness and research antimicrobial resistance, the European Commission has launched a €1m prize for the person or team that develops a rapid test that can tell if a person needs antibiotics or not.

With such a test, doctors will be able to quickly know whether patients with upper respiratory tract infections, such as the common cold, bronchitis and otitis, can be treated safely without antibiotics.

Upper respiratory tract infections are a major reason for the prescription of antibiotics, even though many of these infections are due to viruses, where antibio- tics are neither effective nor necessary.

“Growing resistance to antibiotics is one of the biggest challenges to public health today,” said research commissioner Carlos Moedas.

“We need to find new ways to prevent people from dying from infections that have been treatable for decades, until resistance rendered our drugs ineffective.

“We need to bring new classes of antibiotics to market and we need to take preventative measures to stop antibiotics being over-prescribed and over-used.”

The researcher has complete freedom in devising a test. The only criteria is that it work, be cheap, rapid, easy-to-use for healthcare providers and non or minimally invasive for patients.

This is just one part of a five year action plan that also tries to reduce the use of antibiotics in our food, especially cattle, pigs and poultry, as well as in feed.

This is the first of five Horizon Prizes — called after the EU’s research programme — worth about €6m in total that will be launched by the EU this year.