Antimicrobial Resistance

Debate between Greg Clark and Will Quince

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered antimicrobial resistance.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. Until November last year, I had the privilege of serving as Minister of State at the Department of Health and Social Care, alongside the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), who I am pleased to see here in Westminster Hall today. If I may say so, Mr Dowd, it was a pleasure to work alongside her.

My hon. Friend will know that the DHSC is a Department where, despite one’s best efforts, one spends a considerable amount of time firefighting and dealing reactively with issues. During my time in the DHSC, many pressing issues concerned me, some of which remain today, but one in particular scared me.

If I told the House that there was an issue that was so serious that it is a top World Health Organisation global health threat, that it sits on the UK’s national risk register and that it costs the NHS around £180 million a year, would we be surprised if I also said that most people were not aware of it? What about if I said that globally there were 4.95 million deaths associated with this issue and that 1.27 million of those deaths were directly attributed to it? What if I said that one in five of all those deaths were of children under the age of five? Or how about if I said that deaths in the UK related to this issue are estimated to stand at 12,000 per year, which is the equivalent of deaths from breast cancer? What if I told the House that 10 million people—I repeat that figure; 10 million—are predicted to die globally each year by 2050 because of this issue if urgent measures are not taken?

This debate is about antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. If we walked out into Parliament Square now and asked 100 people at random what “AMR” is, I wonder how many of them would know. For the reasons that I have just set out, we should be aware of AMR and concerned about it. We should be pushing our Government, Governments globally and the World Health Organisation to do more to highlight this top global health threat and to take steps to address it.

AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites no longer respond to antimicrobial medicines. As a result of drug resistance, antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines become ineffective and infections become difficult or indeed impossible to treat, therefore increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, disability and—sadly—death. Although resistance is a natural phenomenon and not just a health issue, from a human healthcare perspective it is accelerated by inappropriate use of antimicrobial drugs, poor infection prevention and control practices, a lack of development of new antimicrobial drugs and insufficient global surveillance of infection rates.

As I have said, the World Health Organisation has declared AMR to be one of the top 10 global health threats, and it is also listed on the UK Government’s national risk register. In 2019, there were 4.95 million deaths associated with bacterial AMR across 204 countries, and 1.27 million of those were directly attributable, leading the WHO to declare it a top public health threat.

The OECD has found that one in five infections—I repeat: one in five infections—is now resistant to antibiotics, with the potential for that rate to double by 2035. In 2021, there were 53,985 serious antibiotic-resistant infections in England, which represented a rise of 2.2% from 2020. If left unchecked, resistance to third-line antimicrobials—the last-resort drugs for difficult-to-treat infections—could be 2.1 times higher by 2035. That means that health systems will be closer to running out of options to treat patients suffering from a range of illnesses such as pneumonia and bloodstream infections. Despite that—this is the really concerning part—no new class of antibiotics has been developed since the 1980s. Preserving and optimising our current antimicrobial arsenal is therefore not just urgent but paramount.

The consequences of AMR are huge. For urinary tract infections caused by E. coli, one in five cases exhibited reduced susceptibility to standard antibiotics. That is making it harder to effectively treat common infections. AMR also presents a threat to malaria control. Antimicrobial resistance is putting the gains of modern medicine at risk, because it makes surgical and medical procedures that are a normalised part of everyday life—such as caesarean sections, cancer chemotherapy and hip replacements—far more risky.

In addition to causing death and disability, AMR has significant economic costs. AMR creates the need for more expensive and intensive care, affects the productivity of patients or their caregivers through prolonged hospital stays and—I appreciate that this is a side issue—harms agricultural productivity. The World Bank estimates that AMR could result in $1 trillion of additional healthcare costs by 2050 and $1 trillion to $3.4 trillion of GDP losses per year by 2030.

Considering the huge risk that AMR poses to health security across the world, I do not believe that enough is being done globally to combat the current inevitability. Let me start by praising the UK Government for their action in this space, in particular the AMR five-year national action plan, or NAP, to contain and control AMR by 2040, which the NHS long-term plan details commitments to implement. I look forward to the update beyond 2024, which this period goes up to.

I could focus the rest of this speech on what more the UK could and arguably should be doing. We do need to see more on robust monitoring and surveillance. We need a significant public awareness campaign, greater investment in diagnostics, monitoring and screening—particularly in relation to rapid point-of-care testing—at local system level and, vitally, greater focus on infection prevention and management. However, I want to spend the rest of the time available to me focusing on international efforts and the role that the UK can play.

[Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) (Con)]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing this very important matter to the Chamber. Before he moves to the international lens, will he reflect on the contribution that bacteriophages can make? Those are the subject of a report from the Select Committee on Science, Innovation and Technology. In effect, they are viruses that eat bacteria. In the UK at the moment, there is no approved manufacturing plant and therefore it is impossible to license phages for clinical use. A facility in Leamington Spa that was used as a Lighthouse lab could be repurposed for that. Does my hon. Friend agree with me that the Government might find that a useful way to address the very significant problem that he describes?

[Will Quince]

I thank my right hon. Friend for bringing that to my attention; it was not something that I was aware of. Given the gravity and seriousness of the situation that we face not just here in the United Kingdom but globally, I think that we need to look at all potential tools in the arsenal to tackle this issue, so I hope that the Minister has heard the case that my right hon. Friend has made very powerfully, and I would be happy to meet with him afterwards to find out more about it, because it sounds incredibly interesting.

My right hon. Friend is right—although I want to focus for some time on the international effort—the battle is not won here in the UK, we have far more to do, and the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England have important roles to play. I know from first-hand experience, including when representing His Majesty’s Government at the World Health Assembly and the United Nations General Assembly when I was Minister of State, the global leadership that the UK shows through the World Health Organisation, especially in partnership with Sweden. During my time, I was proud to be able to announce an investment of £39 million into research through the global AMR innovation fund to help to tackle what is a silent pandemic. I understand that £24 million of that has been awarded to bolster the UK’s partnership with CARB-X, which is a global AMR research initiative that supports the continued early development of invaluable new antibiotics, vaccines, rapid diagnostics and new products that combat life-threatening, drug-resistant infections, as well as prevent death and disease across the world.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Greg Clark and Will Quince

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

The right hon. Gentleman will know that we have already changed the procurement guidance so that local value can be taken into account. We have anticipated the issue he mentions and this is being done.

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

The Secretary of State is aware that I have long campaigned for parental bereavement leave, and I was delighted to see this policy in not only the Conservative manifesto, but the Labour manifesto. On that basis, will he kindly set out what steps the Government will take to introduce this important benefit?

Exiting the EU and Workers’ Rights

Debate between Greg Clark and Will Quince

Monday 7th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I have been very clear that all of the existing law under the EU will be brought into British law. There is no intention of changing that. In fact, so far from wanting to dilute current law, in many ways, as my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) has said, we go further than the EU in a number of important respects. For example, in the UK all workers are protected by a strong set of core rights that do not depend on the type of contract—full time or part time— an employee may be on. That is not consistently the case in other European countries. In the UK, women who have had a child can enjoy 52 weeks of statutory maternity leave and 39 weeks of pay, not just the 14 weeks under EU law.

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that Brexit offers an opportunity to strengthen workers’ rights? [Hon. Members: “Sit down!”] Will he look at my Parental Bereavement Leave (Statutory Entitlement) Bill, which would give the UK the best workers’ rights in the world?

[Greg Clark]

Opposition Members should attend with greater courtesy to my hon. Friend, who speaks with a great deal of experience and knowledge of rights for parents who have suffered bereavement. He has made excellent speeches about that in the House. His private Member’s Bill, which has a huge amount to commend it, would allow bereaved parents to have time off to deal with the consequences of an infant death in their family. I look forward to working with him to make use of his knowledge and wisdom, and to see whether, through the reforms that we will introduce, we can capture the spirit of what he says. I am grateful for his intervention today and his earlier contributions.