Antibiotic Resistance

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I am thrilled that despite my breaking two rules in a short time when I walked into the Chamber you are still allowing me to speak in the debate, Mr Chope. It is a pleasure to follow all the speeches, which have covered virtually all the angles. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) for securing the debate, and for the speech he made.

There is a depressing but nevertheless welcome consensus that we are losing our antibiotics to resistance, and effectively losing modern medicine as we know it. Notwithstanding the threat of Ebola it is hard to imagine a bigger health threat. The World Health Organisation has described antibiotic resistance as a bigger crisis than the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. If we lose antibiotics we risk the return of a time when basic operations will be deadly. I used to wonder what it would take to wake up the British establishment to that appalling threat. For years virtually nothing seemed to be done to combat the extraordinary phenomenon of antibiotic resistance. I thought, naively, perhaps, that once the health establishment blew the whistle, everyone else would fall into line and, fortunately, the health establishment has been blowing the whistle very loudly. We have heard various quotations today of the apocalyptic language of the chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies. I think she has even used the term “apocalypse”. She has said that if we do not take action, deaths will go up and up, and modern medicine will be lost.

That is of course already beginning to happen. It is not a futuristic scenario. In 2006 there were just five cases in which patients failed to respond even to last-resort antibiotics in this country. Last year the number was 600. I know that there has been some action and I do not mean to disparage that. In March last year the Cabinet Office confirmed that it would examine the question of resistance as a national security issue. In September of that year it released an outline UK five-year antimicrobial resistance strategy. The Government have since set up a high-level steering group, chaired by Dr Felicity Harvey, the director general, public health, to implement the strategy once it is released, which I think will be later this year. All that is good news, and it is possible that the strategy will match the urgency of the situation. However, I am afraid that there are worrying signs that it will not.

Yes, there will be renewed efforts to develop new drugs, which is crucial. I was thrilled to hear the Prime Minister’s response to a question on the subject, during Prime Minister’s questions, when he briefly outlined the Government’s commitment to supporting the development of new drugs. That is obviously a prerequisite to solving the problem. There is nothing in the pipeline at all, and, as existing drugs become ineffective, we clearly must hope for new developments and do all that we can to facilitate them. There will also be renewed efforts to limit the inappropriate use of antibiotics in human medicine. That subject has been covered and I shall not dwell on it today. However, so far, successive Governments, including the present one, have resolutely avoided confronting a part of the problem that is not only huge but avoidable.

It is worth repeating that from day one, when Alexander Fleming accepted his part of the Nobel prize, he issued a dire warning. We have heard the quotation and I will not repeat it. The simple reality is that we have completely ignored that warning, more or less from the day he issued it. Instead of treasuring that miracle cure, we have squandered it—not just in hospitals but on intensive farms, and not just to treat sick animals but to keep animals alive in conditions where they otherwise would struggle simply to survive. That is not just a niche concern; 50% or thereabouts of the antibiotics that we use in this country are used on farms and it is even more in the United States and some other countries. Overall use per animal on UK farms is 18% higher today than it was a decade ago. That is disproportionately true of those antibiotics that are critical to human health.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important point: since tetracycline and penicillin-based antibiotics have been banned as growth promoters for farm animals, the use of tetracyclines has up gone tenfold and the use of penicillins has gone up fivefold. This is not a party political point: there is something that the Government can do immediately about that situation, which is to monitor and study it with a view to reducing the excessive use of antibiotics on farms.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and will come on to that briefly—I am going to try to keep my remarks short. That is exactly the point. Many people felt that the ban on the use of growth promoters back in—actually, I forget the year, but I think it was 15 years ago, although I may have got that wrong and am happy to be corrected—