O’Neill Review

Debate between Lord Herbert of South Downs and Kevin Hollinrake

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Kevin Hollinrake]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The key element of the fight against antimicrobial resistance is its global nature. We absolutely must not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world—we must collaborate—but we must take national action, too, and I will come on to that shortly.

That figure is of course a prediction—it could be lower, but it could also be higher. Predictions have been made about other contagions, such Ebola, Zika, HIV and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and our scientists, academics and clinicians thankfully have managed to mitigate the worst effects and worst predictions for those diseases. But there are three reasons for us to be more alarmed this time: first, antimicrobial resistance is already happening; secondly, the problem is spreading rapidly and by all available means; and thirdly, research is not being carried out on anything like the scale required.

[Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

A quarter of all the deaths that are predicted to happen as a result of drug resistance will be caused by tuberculosis, a disease that already kills 1.8 million people a year. Does my hon. Friend agree that research and development is essential if we are to develop a vaccine to prevent tuberculosis? No epidemic has ever been fully beaten without a vaccine.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I absolutely agree. The difficulty is that due to the reward mechanisms in the system, such research and development is not happening. I will turn to that shortly.

This is not an apocalyptic prophecy. Antimicrobial resistance causes some 700,000 deaths globally and an estimated 12,000 deaths in the UK every year—similar to the number of people who lose their lives from breast cancer. Quite simply, if the bacteria that cause infections become resistant to antibiotics, people die. This issue is listed in the national risk register of civil emergencies, a five-year Government register, which states that an

“increasingly serious issue is the development and spread of”

antimicrobial resistance and points out that much of modern medicine will become unsafe. Minor surgery such as organ transplants, bowel surgery, cancer treatments and caesarean sections will become high risk—there will be more illness and more deaths.

Dame Sally Davies, our chief medical officer, pointed out that antibiotics have extended life by an average of 20 years—20 years of our lives may therefore be lost—and 40% of our population could die prematurely if this situation is not resolved. Operations would become unsafe due to the risk of infection during surgery or chemotherapy. Influenza pandemics would become much more serious. The national risk register states:

“The numbers of infections complicated by AMR are expected to increase markedly over the next 20 years. If a widespread outbreak were to occur, we could expect around 200,000 people to be affected by a bacterial blood infection that could not be treated effectively with existing drugs”.