Former Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies apologised to families bereaved by Covid as she slammed the UK's failures in preparing for the pandemic.
READ MORE: Whooping cough hotspots revealed after 6th death in outbreakSuperbugs, pathogens which have evolved resistance to the drugs used to treat them, will make the Covid pandemic look 'minor' in comparison.
Dame Sally's goddaughter, Emily Hoyle, 38, died in late 2022 after contracting a drug-resistant lung infection that couldn't be treated 'It looks like a lot of people with untreatable infections, and we would have to move to isolating people who were untreatable in order not to infect their families and communities. So it’s a really disastrous picture. It would make some of Covid look minor,' she told The Guardian.
AMR already kills an estimated 1.2million people globally each year, more than HIV or malaria, and contributes to the deaths of 5million more. WHAT IS ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE? Antibiotics have been doled out unnecessarily by GPs and hospital staff for decades, fueling once harmless bacteria to become superbugs.
Former chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies claimed in 2016 that the threat of antibiotic resistance is as severe as terrorism. In addition to existing drugs becoming less effective, there have only been one or two new antibiotics developed in the last 30 years. If AMR becomes more widespread it could lead to surgeries like caesareans, as well as treatments that lower the immune system like chemo and organ transplants becoming far more riskier, with potentially deadly consequences.
The 38-year-old was born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease which causes sticky mucus to build up in the lungs.Numerous attempts to treat the infection failed and she died in a hospice in 2022. Announcing the new plan health minister Maria Caulfield said: 'In a world recovering from the profound impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, international collaboration and preparedness for global health challenges have taken on an unprecedented level of importance.'
This problem is thought to be one factor why no new type of antibiotic has been developed since the 80s.
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