The World Is Running Out Of Effective Antibiotics – WHO

Concerns about growing global antibiotic
resistance have plunged into new depths
as the World Health Organisation, WHO, is
now warning that the world is
running out of antibiotics.




There is not enough new
antibiotics being developed,
especially for the most concerning
antibiotic-resistant infections, according
to a WHO report.




Most of the drugs currently in
the clinical pipeline are
modifications of existing
classes of antibiotics and are
only short-term solutions.



The report found very few
potential treatment options for those
antibiotic-resistant
infections identified by WHO
as posing the greatest threat
to health, including drug-resistant
tuberculosis which
kills around 250 000 people
each year.



The United Nations health
agency has aired its concerns
about antibiotic resistance,
which makes it more difficult
to treat infections, for some time. Some of
the group’s latest moves included
updating guidelines for treating sexually
transmitted infections and cautioning that
just three antibiotics are being developed
to treat gonorrhoea.



But the latest WHO report takes a broad
and prospective look at antibiotic
development.




“Antimicrobial resistance is a
global health emergency that
will seriously jeopardize progress in
modern medicine”, says Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO.



“There is an urgent need for more
investment in research and development
for antibiotic-resistant infections including
TB, otherwise we will be forced back to a
time when people feared common
infections and risked
their lives from minor surgery.”


Source-Voplink