SUPERBUGS capable of evading even the most powerful antibiotics are increasing their grip in Europe with rates of drug resistance in one type of bacteria reaching more than 50 per cent in the worst-hit countries, including Cyprus, European health officials said yesterday.
In a report on multi-drug resistant bacteria, or so-called superbugs, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which monitors disease across the European Union, said the need to combat resistance was “critical”.
“We need to declare a war — a war against these bacteria,” the ECDC’s director Marc Sprenger told Reuters in an interview about the report.
“If we don’t … we’ll get lots of infections and many vulnerable patients will become severely ill, and we don’t have the antibiotics to treat them.”
Sprenger said the report found that the countries with the highest rates of multi-drug resistant infections, such as Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria, also tended to be the ones with the highest use of antibiotics.
“In general what you see is that high resistance goes hand in hand with high consumption,” he said.
According to the report Cyprus came out top in antibiotic resistance at 54.5 per cent. Five countries reported below 5.0 per cent resistance, four more between 5.0 and 10 per cent. Six reported resistance ranging from 25 to 50 per cent including Hungary.
Cyprus also topped the ranks for penicillin resistance with 36.4 per cent, a considerable distance from France which followed at 27.7 per cent. Six countries reported below 1.0 per cent resistance while eight others reported resistance between 1.0 and 5.0 per cent, including the UK at 1.7 per cent.
Cyprus did report a consistent decrease in resistance to aminoglycoside used on E. faecalis and reported less than 1.0 per cent resistance. However, most countries reported resistance bellow 5.0 per cent.
In Cyprus those five years of age or older tended to be increasingly resistant to antibiotics. In the case of streptococcus pneumoniae, penicillin did nothing for those aged under four. They worked for 67 per cent of those between the ages of 5 and 19 but their effectiveness took another plunge for those over 20, being effective in only 25 per of cases, cases, according to samples taken between 2009 and 2010.
Resistance for staphylococcus aureus which can cause severe infection went from zero in 5 to 19-year-olds, to 32 per cent in 20 to 64-year-olds.
That resistance was deemed “the most important cause of antibiotic-resistant healthcare-associated infections worldwide,” according to the 2010 antimicrobial resistance surveillance report.
The ECDC’s Sprenger said that across Europe, rates of resistance to last-line antibiotics by a bacteria called Klebsiella pneumoniae had more than doubled to 15 per cent by 2010 from around 7 per cent five years ago.
K. pneumoniae is a common cause of pneumonia, urinary tract, and bloodstream infections in hospital patients. The superbug form is resistant even to a class of medicines called carbapenems, the most powerful known antibiotics, which are usually reserved by doctors as a last line of defence.
The ECDC said several EU member states were now reporting that between 15 and up to 50 per cent of K. pneumoniae from bloodstream infections were resistant to carbapenems.
To a large extent, antibiotic resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them.
Experts say primary care doctors are partly to blame for prescribing antibiotics for patients who demand them unnecessarily, and hospitals are also guilty of overuse.
“Fifty per cent of all antibiotic use in hospitals can be inappropriate,” the ECDC said, urging far more prudent use.
Previous research in Cyprus has shown that more than more than 48 per cent of patients either treat themselves or are prescribed antibiotics, well above the European average of 32 per cent.
In Cyprus about 29 per cent of surgeons make preventative use of antibiotics versus 15 per cent in Europe.
“The emergence of resistant microbes has become a daily phenomenon threatening public health because the infections which they cause can be serious and often threaten the lives of patients,” Health Minister Stavros Malas said yesterday.
“Bad usage of antibiotics, by taking too many of them or wrongly, has been proven to encourage… the appearance of infections from multi-resistant microbes,” he added.
At the same time, there are few new antibiotic drugs on the horizon and experts are worried that only a few big drug firms, such as GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, still have strong antibiotic research and development programmes.
There is little commercial incentive to invest in new drugs that may be held in reserve as last-line weapons.
