O’Neill Review
Debate between Andrew Smith and Kevin Hollinrake(7 years, 8 months ago)
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Kevin Hollinrake
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We need to take action now because of the delays in producing new drugs.
Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. Is it not self-evident that the prevention of the occurrence and spread of infection must be in the first line of the battle against this problem, and screening people on admission to hospital to determine who might be resistant and carrying infections would be very useful?
Kevin Hollinrake
The right hon. Gentleman is right. Some 50% of prescriptions are needless, and diagnostics would mean that a lot of drugs were no longer prescribed.
We talk glibly about tens of thousands of deaths—Stalin once said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic” —but the reality is that these are our partners, our brothers, our sisters and our children, so we must act.