An excellent piece in the Guardian about Professor Richard James, head of the School of Molecular Medical Sciences at the University of Nottingham. He has spent the past thirty years studying bacteria and what he has to say is alarming:
“… When he hears the mantra that cleaner hospitals will reduce infections, he all but clutches his head in his hands. In his view, no matter how clean our hospitals become, we have almost lost the war. Unless new antibiotics are discovered, he believes, we may have to close all our hospitals in the next five years or so.
‘Between 1940 and 1970 – the golden age of antibiotics – we developed thousands of the drugs,’ he explains. ‘And then we squandered them. We fed antibiotics to chickens and cattle. We handed them out to people with a cold. Each time you try to kill bacteria, you’re forcing them to select for survival. Now we’ve basically bred bugs that flourish in a hospital environment and they’re just waiting to bite. You’ve got sick people in there, people having transplants taking drugs to suppress their immune systems, HIV patients, the elderly and the young. And yet nothing is being done.'”
The problem of the promiscous use of antibiotics has been known about for years, but like so many of the problems that face us now, we seem to respond by a brief period of panic and then the issue fades until it returns with greater force. So, if you’re worried about Bird Flu, read this article and you can have something else to be alarmed about.