World Health Day 2011
Drug resistance is becoming more severe and many infections are no longer easily cured, leading to prolonged and expensive treatment and greater risk of death, warns WHO on World Health Day.
WHO calls for urgent and concerted action by governments, health professionals, industry and civil society and patients to slow down the spread of drug resistance, limit its impact today and preserve medical advances for future generations.
On the brink of losing miracle cures
“The message on this World Health Day is loud and clear. The
world is on the brink of losing these miracle cures,” said WHO
Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. “In the absence of urgent corrective
and protective actions, the world is heading towards a post-antibiotic
era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and,
once again, kill unabated.”
The discovery and use of antimicrobial drugs to treat diseases
such as leprosy, tuberculosis, gonorrhea and syphilis changed the
course of medical and human history. Now, those discoveries and the
generations of drugs that followed them are at risk, as high levels of
drug resistance threaten their effectiveness.
Drug resistance is a natural biological phenomenon, through
which microorganisms acquire resistance to the drugs meant to kill them.
With each new generation, the microorganism carrying the resistant gene
becomes ever more dominant until the drug is completely ineffective.
Inappropriate use of infection-fighting drugs (underuse, overuse or
misuse) causes resistance to emerge faster.
Resistance detected in a number of diseases
Last year, at least 440 000 new cases of multidrug
resistant-tuberculosis were detected and extensively drug-resistant
tuberculosis has been reported in 69 countries to date. The malaria
parasite is acquiring resistance to even the latest generation of
medicines, and resistant strains causing gonorrhea and shigella are
limiting treatment options.
Serious infections acquired in hospitals can become fatal because they
are so difficult to treat and drug-resistant strains of microorganism
are spread from one geographical location to another in today's
interconnected and globalized world. Resistance is also emerging to the
antiretroviral medicines used to treat people living with HIV.
Getting everyone on the right track
“On this World Health Day, WHO is issuing a policy package to
get everyone, especially governments and their drug regulatory systems,
on the right track, with the right measures, quickly,” said Dr Chan.
“The trends are clear and ominous. No action today means no cure
tomorrow. At a time of multiple calamities in the world, we cannot allow
the loss of essential medicines – essential cures for many millions of
people – to become the next global crisis.”
Approximately half of current antibiotic production is used in
agriculture, to promote growth and prevent disease as well as to treat
sick animals. With such massive use, those drug resistant microbes
generated in animals can be later transferred to humans.
Today, less than five per cent of products in the research and development pipeline are antibiotic drugs.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2011/whd_20110406/en/#
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