by Jonathan Benson
(NaturalNews) The most powerful class of antibiotics known to man appears to be losing its ability to fight deadly infections in Europe, says the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). A recent announcement by this European Union (EU) monitoring agency warns that carbapenems, an extremely powerful class of antibiotics typically used as a last resort when all else fails, are simply no match to the many emerging “superbugs” that have developed resistance to them.
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This latest round of warnings, which follows several years’ worth of previous warnings, draws fresh attention to the continued overuse and misuse of antibiotics all around the world. With each passing year, more and more infection types are failing to respond to carbapenems, which means that all available conventional options for treating and defeating them have basically been exhausted. ECDC also says there has been a sharp uptick in resistance rates just within the past four years, especially in Southern Europe.
“Carbapenems are the last-line class of antibiotics, so the situation is really worrying,” says ECDC director Marc Sprenger. “Since 2009, it has become increasingly common for hospitals to be faced with treating patients that have carbapenem-resistant infections, often meaning that old and toxic drugs are used.”
According to the latest data gathered by ECDC, almost every European country now has documented cases of carbapenem-resistant infections at hospitals. In some areas of Southern and Eastern Europe, including in Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia, as many as 5 percent of Klebsiella pneumoniae infections are resistant. And as for the Acinetobacter bacteria, as many as 25 percent of infections in at least eight of the 18 reporting countries are resistant.
“We need to find ways to use valuable antimicrobial drugs more wisely and to develop new drugs and treatments,” says Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science.
The EU recently approved funding for a joint project between Switzerland-based drug giant Roche and Polyphor to develop and commercialize an experimental antibiotic that the two companies say might be able to help fight hospital superbugs. Since most of the world’s major drug companies are focused on other projects unrelated to antibiotics, the goal is to help fill this gap and develop new therapies to overcome the superbug epidemic.