In the EU alone, tens of thousands of people die every year from infections caused by antibiotic-resistant pathogens. And the supply of antibiotics is stalling. Experts are now sounding the alarm.
The spread of drug resistance is causing alarm among experts. “We are currently in the process of losing the achievements of modern medicine again and falling back into the time before the discovery of penicillin,” said the President of the Paul Ehrlich Society for Infection Therapy (PEG), Mathias Pletz, in Weimar. The effectiveness of antibiotics is increasingly at risk. There is a need for a cautious use of antibiotics and a constant stream of new, resistance-breaking agents.
In the European Union alone, according to the EU health authority ECDC, 35,000 people die every year from infections caused by antibiotic-resistant pathogens. According to the Robert Koch Institute, when antibiotics are used, they do not kill all bacteria – the resistant ones survive and continue to multiply. It was said that the development of resistance cannot be prevented, only slowed down.
A key cause of the increase in resistance is the excessive and inappropriate use of antibiotics in human and veterinary medicine. Each application can lead to the proliferation of resistant bacteria, as these then have a survival advantage.
According to the PEG, only twelve new antibiotics have been approved since 2017. Ten of them belonged to classes against which resistance mechanisms had already developed. The problem is that pharmaceutical companies are increasingly giving up producing antibiotics because it doesn’t pay off. Economic incentives are therefore urgently needed from the federal government.