In recent years, efforts to combat drug-resistant bacteria have focused on the immediate goal of reducing rates of hospital-acquired infections. But now global health officials face an approaching crisis: the number of different antibiotics available to treat such infections when they do occur is dwindling because pharmaceutical companies have neglected to invest in the development of new types of drugs.
Bacterial and parasitic diseases are the second-leading cause of death worldwide, according to a report on antibiotic research released Sept. 17 by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), with 175,000 deaths attributed to hospital-acquired infections each year in Europe alone. And due to the emergence of drug-resistant "superbugs," such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), traditional antibiotics such as penicillin and its derivatives are becoming obsolete. New antibiotics are desperately needed, but the amount of money being spent on the research and development of these drugs is woefully inadequate. "The issue is quite dreadful," says Elias Mossialos, a professor of Health Policy at LSE and author of the report.
"When you look down the pipeline, there are only a handful of new antibiotics in development, and all in the early stages."There are several reasons why it's not cost-effective for the major pharmaceutical companies to invest more in antibiotic research, the report found. The course of antibiotic treatment is typically short because the drugs help patients get better quickly, and doctors tend to curtail the number of prescriptions they write so as to avoid patients developing resistance to the drugs. And when resistance to a certain antibiotic inevitable develops, the drug becomes largely obsolete
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