SAN FRANCISCO: People are over-consuming antibiotics even as microbes constantly look for ways to survive the drugs’ effects, doctors have warned.

And antibiotics’ lesser efficacy in fighting mutant pathogens is responsible for 90,000 deaths a year in the wake of blood infections, said Louis Rice, of the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

“Antibiotic resistance is a huge problem, in fact is the next big problem,” Rice told the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, which opened Wednesday and has brought together more than 10,000 doctors and researchers from around the world.

“Microbes have a lot of tools to adapt and become resistent ... a remarkable ability to acquire resistance. These bugs can become resistant just by exposure,” Rice said, because medical professionals over-rely on them.

“They will continue to get worse (more resistant) if we continue to do what we are doing,” Rice said in his keynote address.

“There is a statistically significant association of mortality with inappropriate therapy at the beginning of the illness ... because the organism that was created the infection was resistant,” he warned.

Rice recommended that federal guidelines be developed on the length of treatment needed for an antibiotic to treat infection. That would have the effect of reducing the length of many treatments and limiting the emergence of pathogen resistance.

Rice also said the pharmaceutical industry should not encourage antibiotics’ overuse.

“For the pharmaceutical companies, it makes sense financially to encourage the overuse of antibiotics but it’s wrong medically .... Your products, you make billions and billions of dollars on, and have created this problem and you can’t just walk away.

Pharmaceutical companies need to be responsible for the problem they have come to create,” Rice said.

Another problem is a lack of new antibiotics on the market just as existing medications are losing effectiveness.

“The federal agencies have to pay attention to these problems and they have to think big,” Rice said.—AFP