Antimicrobial resistance: what are our future needs?

Antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Wherever antibiotics are used, drug resistance will develop, and the more antibiotics we use the worse the situation will become, so we have the emergence of multidrug resistance and then, in the worst-case scenario, untreatable bacterial infections will start to occur more frequently. Around the world, clinicians and other health professionals are being urged to prescribe antibiotics only for confirmed bacterial infections, and then only when absolutely necessary. This is antibiotic stewardship and we should all be looking to promote this process within healthcare systems in the UK.

In 2014, economist Lord Jim O’Neill was commissioned by the government to look into the impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and the lack of new antibiotics coming to market. We cannot forget that AMR is a critical global threat and now sits alongside terrorism and climate change on the Global Risk Register. At present, approximately 700,000 deaths per year are attributed to antimicrobial resistance globally. Without global action to reduce AMR, an additional 10 million people could die every year from drug-resistant infection by 2050. That is more than currently die from cancer, and eight times more people than die from road accidents.¹ According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Gram-negative bacteria are responsible for approximately two-thirds of the estimated 25,000 deaths that result from antimicrobial resistance annually in Europe. In the poorest countries <1% of patients are treated at clinical facilities that have diagnostic microbiology laboratories; ² to quote Professor Dame Sally Davies (Chief Medical Officer for England) we are approaching “antibiotic apocalypse”.

Mast is a privately UK owned company that has been manufacturing antibiotic susceptibility test products since 1957, and continues to be at the forefront of developments in this field. Mast is utilising its 60 years of experience of development and manufacture of antimicrobial tests products with mastpharma services. These offer extra confidence in the success of the development of antimicrobial compounds for final commercialisation by ensuring the availability of antibiotic susceptibility test devices incorporating the new compound. Mast provides custom manufacture for in vitro antibiotic susceptibility testing and comparison of antimicrobial activity of novel and established compounds, and multiple cartridge formats are available to meet all international requirements for both the European Committee on Antimicrobial Sensitivity Testing (EUCAST) and Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI).