Antimicrobial Resistance

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness is quite right about the risk in London. We actually have a good TB story in this country—a 41% reduction between 2011 and 2016—but London has the highest rates in the UK. I can tell her that Public Health England and the GLA are working closely together to reduce TB. In fact there are innovative new approaches, such as UCLH’s Find & Treat mobile unit, which I myself visited last year, which is going out and finding people at the highest risk, screening them and then taking them for treatment.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, accepting that the overprescribing or inappropriate prescribing of any drug is a bad idea, the issue of bacterial infections will remain with us. I hope the new strategy that the Minister mentioned will address the issue of how we might tackle bacterial infections in future. This could be by developing new antibiotics; developing drugs that deal with infections but do not produce resistance; developing therapies such as boosting the immune response to be able to cope with these infections; and even, if I may say so, developing drugs that might deal with so-called zombie cells that cause infections, which would be more appropriate for older people. I therefore hope his new strategy will address the necessary research.

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I can reassure the noble Lord on that front. We have made good progress in dealing with hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA and C. difficile, although unfortunately we have had less success with E. coli. Obviously, a big part of this is driving down infections completely. The other part is about drug discovery, and that is a big global action. It is part of the G20 work that we are taking forward with Argentina to ensure that we have new classes of antibiotics to deal with these problems.