Health authorities and institutions have been concerned for several years about a resistance increasingly important from microbes to antibiotics, a threat on a global scale, according to specialists. It’s the turn of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to be alarmed.
The federal agency estimates that antibiotic resistance is at least 23,000 dead every year. “It’s a major problem,” explains Professor Patrice Courvalin, who heads the National Reference Center for Antibiotic Resistance at the Institut Pasteur. “The problem is not just not being able to treat a disease anymore, but having to one day draw a line under 20 to 30 years of medical progress,” he explains.
Tuberculosis is the most representative infection of this evolution. Mutant strains of bacteria insensitive to drugs have developed and nearly 5% of new cases of tuberculosis are due to multidrug-resistant bacilli.
Misused medicine
When germs don’t respond to antibiotics, infections become time-consuming, expensive, and the risk of transmission and death increases. The World Health Organization (WHO) believes that the inappropriate use of antibiotics is the primary cause of resistance. In poor countries, the dose administered is too low, while in rich countries, it is excessive.
The message “antibiotics are not automatic” seems to have entered the minds of the French, who now rank third among European consumers of antibiotics per capita, after having been in first position for a long time. “The habit of prescribing them unnecessarily for viral diseases is fading, but 20% of the drugs that ‘sleep’ in medicine cabinets are antibiotics”, notes AFP.
Another problem: half of the antimicrobials used on Western farms are used to increase the meat yield of farm animals. A practice that the WHO has been trying to limit and monitor for more than ten years.
