O’Neill Review Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
Rebecca Pow
Main Page: Rebecca Pow (Conservative - Taunton Deane)Department Debates - View all Rebecca Pow's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(7 years, 9 months ago)
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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.
Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful point, but is not the key to find new antibiotics? Is he aware that several antibiotics originated from organisms in soil? That is how penicillin was found, and the first lead on a new antibiotic was recently found in soil. Does he agree that protecting our soil is key to our future? Given how much soil is being eroded and degraded, the Government should treat that as an important issue.
Kevin Hollinrake
My hon. Friend is a fantastic champion of the natural environment, and she makes a very good point.
The World Health Organisation has stated that antimicrobial resistance is
“one of the greatest challenges for public health”
and that the problem is increasing and we are
“fast running out of…options.”
Antibiotic resistance is just one form of antimicrobial resistance—others concern viral and fungal infections—but my focus is antibiotics, which the public more readily understand and should have real concerns about. Bacteria undergo an eternal battle for survival, and natural resistance occurs as a result of bacteria fighting that battle, but when we use antibiotics—particularly when we overuse them—that natural resistance accelerates significantly and becomes super-charged, and we end up with many more antibiotic-resistant bacteria.