EU sounds cry of alarm over resistance to antibiotics

The European Union warned Thursday of a sharp rise in deaths across the 27-nation bloc due to bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics.

With some 25,000 Europeans dying each year from infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria, European health commissioner John Dalli said "we need to take swift and determined action if we do not want to lose antimicrobial medicines" for humans and animals.

Antimicrobials include antibiotics and can also be used as disinfectants and antiseptics.

Data issued by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control show resistance to pathogens which often cause pneumonia and urinary tract infections in hospitals on the rise, at a cost of over 1.5 billion euros ($2.0 billion) in care and productivity losses.

A five-year EU plan to contain the risk of antimicrobial resistance, also known as AMR, calls for research in areas affecting both humans and animals, as resistant bacteria can be transferred from animals to humans in the food chain.

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0rison

5 / 5 (1) Nov 17, 2011

Perhaps antibiotics should not be used to fatten livestock.

Osiris1

3 / 5 (2) Nov 18, 2011

Antibiotics should not be used to enable dairies' use of the hormone rBST to artificially boost milk production. When cows are given this to boost production, this form of poison farming spreads where legal and drives out wholesome production in a flood of bovine hormone tainted products. In some states like Michigan and Indiana, it is illegal for its citizens to tell the public that the hormone is in their milk and other dairy products, a law lobbied into place by the drug industry. These hormones are known to decrease the immune systems of all that consume them. That may include human second hand consumers who eagerly lap up the milk in those states whilst totally ignorant of the risks put upon them by greedy drug purveyors and the farmers who buy those drugs to enable them to drive out their competitors. As such, foreigners who would seek to harm us in biological war would probably target those states first to gain maximum death rate.

Lunarblade

not rated yet Nov 29, 2011

Why not use Penicillin it cured everything in the mid 1900s. Oh wait, we nuked that drug. There needs to be some serious funding for antimicrobial susceptibility testing. Do not forget that some physicians giving out antibiotics for the wrong reasons have induced this microbial resistance. The lack of research is due to the lack of profit in antibiotic distribution. It is relatively cheap when compared to drugs for chronic diseases. Follow the money.

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