YOU may have missed the fact that today was a World Health Day devoted to antibiotics; if you hadn’t, then it is, or at least was. In any case, it’s more or less over now and the issue can sink into the din of background noise.

As Frank Swain put it in in his well researched, and typically pithy, Guardian article today:

Health experts have been ringing the alarm over antimicrobial resistance for so long that it seems to have become part of our collective background noise, like the endless rasp of waves on the shore. And like stupid tourists, we sleep in the sun while the tide comes in.

A little pithiness is warranted, because if we find ourselves still in this situation in 2021, I’m going to be either, a) A disgruntled cash-strapped senior lecturer / reader / professor with a serious Cassandra complex; b) long since departed from research due to lack of funding; or c) dead, or missing a limb, due to an untreatable bacterial infection, or grieving over the same in a loved one.

I’ve written previously about some of the reasons we don’t have new drugs, and we can keep re-stating these issues ad nauseam, but it doesn’t mean anything will actually change. The broad response of governments following the ReAct meeting in Stockholm last year was more words, then an eerie silence. Similarly, in a meeting of the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BSAC), bylined ‘The Urgent Need’, more words were said amongst people who already familiar with those words, following which there has also been an eerie silence.

Continue reading “No action today, no antibiotics tomorrow…” →