Unnecessary use of antibiotics is creating more superbugs
Canadian medical professionals are warning there are an ever-increasing number of infections that are becoming resistant to treatment with the current drugs available.
Dr. John Conly is the medical director of infection prevention and control at the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary. He told a Senate committee in Ottawa last week that there are not only now superbugs resistant to the particular drug typically used in treatment against them, but which have become multi-drug resistant.
He said, “It’s a calamity…based on the unabated and massive use of antibiotics in virtually all sectors of society. Not only in the human side but in the agricultural side”.
The doctors are calling on the government to close loopholes which allow Canada’s agri-business and farmers to relatively unregulated feeding of antibiotics to livestock to boost animal growth and /or as a preventative measure against infection.
This kind of use is something which helps create resistance in microbes but its use is virtually “untrackable” in Canada the doctors said.
Dr. David Patrick, of the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, also appeared at the Senate committee last week.
He said that resistant organisms now cause about 2,000 deaths a year in Canada, but added that tens of thousands of others in Canada now suffer serious illness because of resistant microbes. He pointed out that common bladder infections are now much harder to treat, along with one in four skin abcesses.
Dr. Patrick said agriculture is using about eight times more antibiotics by weight than does the medical system, while Dr. Conly estimated about 40% to 80% of antibiotic use is unnecessary.
Dr Conly said in his testimony, that not only is resistance growing and spreading rapidly, including a strain of the very common E Coli bacteria, but the creation of new drugs is very slow, a “double whammy”.
Drs, Conly, Patrick, and many of their infectious disease colleagues are frustrated by Canada’s lack of action.
The Public Health Agency of Canada said in 2009 it was working on a “coherent path forward to address antimicrobial resistance in Canada”, but has done little to deliver on that pledge
“Canada is an international embarrassment with its lack of a coordinated action plan” said Dr. Conly in an interview.
The doctors say what is urgently needed is that the loopholes in agricultural use be closed, that more education be done for the public to understand the implications of unnecessary antibiotic use, and that more careful government monitoring be created and that “timely” data on resistant microbes circulating in Canada become available to aid in tailoring treatments and reducing antibiotic overuse.
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