Antimicrobial Resistance

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate and revealed again the depth and breadth of the knowledge and passion your Lordships’ House has on this issue. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for initiating the debate and the Library and many other organisations for their helpful briefings. I feel I should declare that I am a member of a CCG. I say that because it is rare to see a subject that is the victim of as many acronyms as the NHS, but this field certainly challenges that, combining as it does health, farming and the environment, the research and science communities, pharma businesses and international organisations. I was very grateful for the list of acronyms at the front of the Government’s five-year paper.

As noble Lords have said, we know that AMR currently results in 700,000 deaths globally every year, that by 2050 that could be 10 million, and that it threatens to turn back the clock on a century of medicine, rendering modern surgery, organ transplantation and chemotherapy too dangerous to use. Preventive treatment is needed, as the report says, to curb the spread of bacterial diseases requiring antibiotics. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, vaccines are the most effective preventive health tool in human history. We therefore need to expand the use of existing vaccines to have a better impact.

One of the most serious issues in the fight against AMR, which almost every noble Lord mentioned, is that no new class of antibiotics has been introduced for more than 30 years. Antibiotics are quite unlike any other category of drug, because every dose of antibiotics poses the risk of encouraging bacteria to adapt and develop resistance. That was illustrated by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, in her description of the fight she has been having, which we have discussed on several occasions over the past year.

The Government’s five-year action plan is indeed an impressive document and a step along the road. I join the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, in saying that we may not be moving as quickly as we should. That has been echoed across the Chamber. Of course, it is not the complete solution, and serious questions have been asked in the debate. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, in saying that the plan is disappointing in that it fails to give a clear commitment to incorporate into domestic law the European Union’s recently agreed legislation that bans routine preventive use of antimicrobials. It is a pertinent question at this point. Article 107.1 provides:

“Antimicrobial medicinal products shall not be applied routinely nor used to compensate for poor hygiene, inadequate animal husbandry or lack of care or to compensate for poor farm management”.


That is not being incorporated into UK law, as far as we can tell. I agree with the noble Baroness that the answers given to questions in the Commons were ambiguous, to put it mildly. Perhaps the Minister could take this opportunity to clarify the issue.

When I discussed the five-year plan with my noble friend Lord Winston, who regrets that he cannot join us this afternoon, he said two things to me. The first was that meeting this challenge will be well-nigh impossible given the dearth of lab, technical and science staff in the NHS at this moment. Secondly, he said that investment in research needs to be much greater and the follow-through more effective. My noble friend would have put those points more eloquently and, probably, more forcefully than I have, but neither of those issues is new; they have been articulated in your Lordships’ House over a long period.

Part of the NHS long-term plan talks about the delivery of the five-year plan we are discussing today. Will the staffing review address technical staff, of which there is a terrible shortage? They are essential for the delivery of both the NHS long-term plan and this plan. We know that the issue of research is not just about funding to deliver ground-breaking research. The UK does a great job in training PhD students, but loses a lot of talented people because the post-doctoral period is so unstable. We need continued support for interdisciplinary networks to strengthen research and develop capacity. Does the strategy address that issue as robustly as the emergency that we are facing requires?

Many noble Lords mentioned market failure, which the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, dwelled on in his opening remarks. According to Professor Dame Sally Davies, the reason for that is in part that the easy wins have been made and there is now a fundamental failure of the market for new antibiotics. Given the growing threat of AMR and the need to conserve and use current and future antibiotics carefully to preserve their effectiveness for as long as possible, it is clear that pharmaceutical companies are aware that any new antibiotic they bring to market will be prescribed only very sparingly rather than as a first-line treatment during its patent life, thereby reducing its profitability. I found that idea very dispiriting because it seems that we must address market failure. The report of the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill of Gatley, also recognised and addressed this issue.

That is even more discouraging when one realises that, over the past five years, we have seen pharmaceutical companies withdraw further and further from the development of antibiotics. In June last year, the latest company, Novartis, exited the market, bringing the total number of companies involved in antimicrobial drug development to six. The issues of market failure and disinvestment are incredibly important; therefore, the Government’s scheme to delink the price paid for antimicrobials from the volume sold is also crucial.

Even more depressingly, Professor Dame Sally Davies argued that the industry needed to step up and act in a socially responsible way, pointing out that tackling AMR was also in its interest. In her evidence to the Commons Select Committee, whose report I found extremely useful, she said:

“I am disappointed by the number of them”—


pharmaceutical companies—

“who have said quietly over a drink, ‘Well, Sally, we know you’re going to solve this. The Government will have to pay, so we’re waiting until you pay’”.

Where is the social responsibility? What terrible short-sightedness. To go back to the point about losing modern medicine, what is the point of developing the world’s greatest cancer portfolio if there are no antibiotics to rescue the patients? Yet industry expects us in government and the public sector to fund this, or that it will happen through somebody else being corporately responsible.

This market failure might lead to catastrophic consequences, as referred to on pages 74 and 76 of the five-year plan. It rightly states:

“The UK cannot solve such market failures alone”.


I question that because I should not like to think that the idea that we cannot solve this alone because we are 3% of the world market means that we do not try to do things in this country to turn this round. Our NHS has huge purchasing power: it pays billions of pounds to pharma, which makes billions in profit from these sales, for the drugs and treatments we need. We must have some leverage here. I ask the Minister: if a UK university or small pharma company found a new antibiotic, surely our Government would find a way to make sure that it was developed and brought to market. They would not wait for this to happen on the world stage, would they? I really want to hear that we will not have a repeat in the UK of the situation described in the MRC report, as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. I received that report; the story of Achaogen was a graphic one of market failure in developing a new antibiotic. However, the noble Lord did not ask something that I wish to ask: what will happen to that drug? Achaogen developed a drug that can treat the most serious superbugs; therefore, it is not much needed so the company did not make enough money and went bankrupt. Where has that drug gone? What has happened to it? That is an important question.

[Lord Lansley]

As I understand it, the company is up for sale so, effectively, people would buy the patent and the drug.

[Baroness Thornton]

Let us hope that the people who buy it are public-spirited enough to know that they need to develop it and that that can be done. That puzzled me when I read the fascinating article, which I recommend to noble Lords. I thought, “A new antibiotic is out there and it is not available to us, for goodness’ sake”.

I congratulate the Government on the five-year plan. It is important, however, that the impetus behind it works, that the incentivisation schemes unlock investment in AMR, that we do not face the same issues being faced in America, and that implementation of the plan is speeded up.