Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford on 14 May (HL15384), what assessment they have made of the number of people, with or without resistant blood stream infections, who have Carbapenem resistant E. coli-like bacteria present in their bodies; and what (1) proposed, and (2) current, initiatives there are to control the transmission of such bacteria.

The 2018 English surveillance programme for antimicrobial utilisation and resistance report contains information on carbapenem-resistant Escherichia coli (E. coli) causing bloodstream infections in England. In 2017 there were 18 cases. The number of people with other infections and carriage of E. coli resistant to carbapenems is harder to ascertain as surveillance is not as uniform.

Public Health England (PHE) publishes guidance on the prevention and control of carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (including E. coli); guidance is available for both acute and non-acute settings, copies of the Toolkit for managing carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae in non-acute and community settings and Acute trust toolkit for the early detection, management and control of carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae are attached. PHE is supporting actions outlined in the United Kingdom’s Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance National Action Plan that aim to prevent and control the transmission of carbapenem-resistant bacteria, which includes reducing the number of specific drug-resistant infections in people by 10% by 2025; reducing UK antimicrobial use in humans by 15% by 2024; and adding carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative infections to the list of notifiable diseases in existing laboratory reporting systems.