Ian Sample, science correspondent The Guardian, Wednesday 23 January 2013
Chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies tells MPs issue should be added to national risk register of civil emergencies Hospital superbugs such as MRSA are some of the best know antibiotic-resistant diseases, but MPs were warned about infections such as gonorrhea and TB that affect the general population. Photograph: Getty Images
Britain's most senior medical adviser has warned MPs that the rise in drug-resistant diseases could trigger a national emergency comparable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, pandemic flu or major coastal flooding.
Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said the threat from infections that are resistant to frontline antibiotics was so serious that the issue should be added to the government's national risk register of civil emergencies.
She described what she called an "apocalyptic scenario" where people going for simple operations in 20 years' time die of routine infections "because we have run out of antibiotics"………"We are becoming increasingly reliant on antibiotics in a whole range of areas of medicine. If we don't have new antibiotics to deal with the problems of resistance we see, we are going to be in serious trouble…..The supply of new antibiotics has dried up for several reasons, but a major one is that drugs companies see greater profits in medicines that treat chronic conditions, such as heart disease, which patients must take for years or even decades. "There is a broken market model for making new antibiotics…To Read More….
My Take - The most important statement in this article is "There is a broken market model for making new antibiotics". Why is this most important statement? Because it should influence clear thinking people to ask this one overriding question...."Why is it broken?" The article seems to make an attempt to blame the drug companies by saying,"The supply of new antibiotics has dried up for several reasons, but a major one is that drugs companies see greater profits in medicines that treat chronic conditions, such as heart disease, which patients must take for years or even decades". Let's get real here folks.
Are we to believe that there are more drugs taken by patients with chronic problems than for all the antibiotics for all the potential infections by all the people in the world for so many ailments all over the world? The reality is socialized medicine all over the world controlled the price of antibiotics and countries even attempted to force the drug manufacturers to turn the patents over to them. That is a concept takes all the profit out of antibiotic research; research that costs billions. We need to get this. If there is a profit there will be new and better products. If there isn’t any profit then there will be no products at all. When that happens people will die and all the emotional socialist swill propounded by the demagogues will not change that.
It gets worse. Here are the long term consequences of interference by promoters of socialized medicine. When drug companies seriously reduce, or even abandon research in some area of medicine, they have to get rid of the researchers that do that kind of work. Medical research isn't like a production line. You just can't unplug one researcher specializing in one kind of research and then plug them into another and expect results. It’s way too complicated and takes years of experience to be any good at what they do. So when they lose those people it takes years to build up a research staff that can do the job, and then even more years to develop products that work, and then ever more years to get them approved. If those drug companies that abandoned or seriously reduced antibiotic research dropped everything they are doing and heavily started work to develop new antibiotics right now it would take 10 to 20 years before anything new came on the market.
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