World Health Day

Today( the 7th) is World Health Day. To mark the event the World Health Organisation is highlighting the problem of drug-resistant infections or, super bugs. Figures from the WHO suggest each year there are over 400 thousand cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis, causing 150 thousand deaths. Drug-resistant malaria is on the increase in tropical countries and western hospitals are struggling to fight the drug resistant infection MRSA. This is thought to cause 25 thousand deaths per year in the European Union alone. CRI's Dominic Swire has more.

Next time you catch a cold, think twice before you reach into the medicine box. That's the advice from Dr Fabio Scano, an expert with the World Health Organisation in China.

"There is a lot of miss-belief about antibiotics. There's a tendency of thinking, from the patients' perspective, that if the doctor doesn't prescribe antibiotics, he's not a good doctor."

The danger is that taking antibiotics when not necessary, or not taking all medicine prescribed by a doctor, can help infections develop resistance to drugs, or in other words anti-microbial resistance. Dr Scano explains.

"Anti microbial resistance is when a microorganism or bacteria develops resistance to the most common antibiotics. And so we go for a second line of antibiotics to treat them, which is generally much more expensive. And sometimes they also develop resistance to this second line, so the options of treating this microorganism become less and less."

Many infections across the world are developing resistance to common drugs such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV. But Dr Scano says it's difficult to know exact figures.

"Actually, we don't know the real magnitude of the problem because the surveillance systems around the world definitely need to be improved. It's clear this is not just a problem of developing countries but also advanced economies. Not all industrialized countries have sound surveillance systems to measure the number of cases and especially the number of deaths."

To tackle the problem, the World Health Organisation is calling for more effort from governments, drug companies and the public. Dr Scano again.

"It's very complex because there is not one player, but multiple stakeholders and everybody has a role to play. I think we should focus on what needs to be done within the government but also pharmaceutical companies and definitely drug regulatory bodies, which are responsible for how the drugs are used. 4.36 But also the public has a responsibility because many times they ask for antibiotics when it's not needed."

Dr Scano says it's unclear whether the next world epidemic will be caused by a superbug, but to reduce this risk he says we need to address this problem now.

For CRI, I'm Dominic Swire.