The Guardian view on antibiotic resistance: a clear and present danger | Editorial
Antibiotic resistance may not seem as urgent as terrorism or the NHS funding shortfall. But it is actually a threat that could kill many more people and degrade the quality of civilised life much more. Chinese scientists have discovered a gene in bacteria that conveys resistance to colistin, a drug presently used in humans when other antibiotics won't work but also used on a large scale in pig farms. It's bad enough that such a gene has emerged - and will obviously be favoured by natural selection. What's worse is that it's found in a plasmid, a ring of DNA that can be passed directly between different strains of bacteria as well as being simply inherited. Just as we can catch infections from other people, the bacteria that cause them can now transmit to each other an immunity to our countermeasure.
The new mutation is only found in one (large) class of dangerous bacteria and it only confers resistance to one particular antibiotic. But when that is the drug of last resort it's frightening, and the overuse of antibiotics makes it almost certain that similar mutations will emerge, and spread, in other bacterial populations. The crisis is not just caused by human overprescription. The use of antibiotics in agriculture is a much greater scandal still. Animals are routinely dosed so that they can tolerate the overcrowding essential to factory farming. This is not only cruel but enormously shortsighted. The populations of food animals in south-east Asia provide a reservoir of infection for humans: we see this in the successive waves of flu that originate among the ducks and chickens there and then spread round the world. As more of the world eats more meat, farming will become more economically efficient, which is to say more cruel and more dependent on routine antibiotic dosage. This is a global problem and it will become a global health crisis, too.
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