A real threat to our way of life - Overuse of antibiotics

IT is a peculiarity of our age of plenty and, in terms of human history at least, pretty decent standards of living, that dystopian, end-of-civilisation themes are so popular in our culture.

Film after film, digital game after digital game, focus on what a world stripped of the certainties that sustain our way of life might be like. Survival is the only rule and chaos is little more than a background to a survival-of-the-fittest Armageddon. Optimism is not abundant.

It is increasingly clear that these blood-and-guts dramas will seem almost as fairytales if the dire predictions about the overuse and ineffectiveness of antibiotics, today’s elixir of life, come to pass. Experts have warned that resistance to the drugs used to fight common, once deadly, infections could be a bigger threat to mankind than cancer. Overcoming anti-microbial resistance is “absolutely essential”, said Jim O’Neill as he published a global plan to prevent drug- resistant infections and defeat ever-stronger superbugs.

One of his suggestions, one with particular relevance in this economy, is that pharmaceutical companies should “play or pay” — either join the search to hunt for new antibiotics or pay a fine. However that plays out, it is certain that we need to develop a far more rigorous attitude to the over- use of antibiotics in medicine and in our food chain. The risks in a world without antibiotics are almost incalculable.