-
- There will be a
five-year window of vulnerability from
2002 in which people will be
especially at risk from antibiotic-resistant
"superbugs", a
scientist has warned.
-
- "We're not going to see new antibiotics until at
least 2007 in any significant numbers," Dr George Post, of SmithKline
Beecham, told the Festival of Science in Sheffield.
-
- "So as more and more bugs
become resistant to more
and more antibiotics, we will have a definite
window of vulnerability before
the new antibiotics begin to be
introduced," the chief scientific
officer of the British drugs
giant added.
-
- "Superbugs" cause infections untreatable with
any
existing drugs and have emerged, in part, through the indiscriminate
prescribing of antibiotics by doctors. This has given the bacteria more
opportunities to evolve and become resistant to the drugs.
-
- Leading drug
companies have boosted their budgets to
develop new antibiotics but the
complexities of bacteria and the time it
takes to develop and test new
drugs mean it will be years before new antibiotics
are on the
market.
-
- Viral Warfare
-
- The new class of antibiotics
will have to be different
from current drugs and be able to kill
bacteria in a completely different
way.
-
- One possible approach, said Dr
Martin Westwell of Oxford
University, is to use bacteriophages. These
are viruses that kill specific
bacteria but do not harm humans.
-
- "This year the
first person in the West to be cured
of a bacterial infection by using
a virus has actually occurred,"
he claimed.
-
- The woman had an
antibiotic-resistant infection that
was cured with phage therapy. The
virus was injected into her body and
it killed the bacteria.
-
- Scientists in the
former Soviet republic of Georgia have
been developing bacteriophage
therapy since the 1920s.
-
- Dr Westwell said it could work against
"superbugs"
because, unlike antibiotics, every time bacteria
develop a defence against
the phage, it will itself evolve a new way of
killing the bacteria.
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