Antibiotic Action’s message was delivered straight to the heart of government yesterday by two of its lead campaigners, Prof Laura Piddock and Tracey Guise, as well as nurse Vickie Longstaff and ITV’s best known doc, Dr Hilary Jones. They delivered a petition signed by almost 5,000 clinicians and researchers urging government to support the urgent need for new antibiotics.

It followed a parliamentary launch during which Kevin Barron MP, former chair of the Health Select Committee, said he was tabling an Early Day Motion on this issue, and was hoping that a new all party parliamentary group would be set up to take it forward.

The campaign is now going global and will be launched in other countries;  it is vital that its messages spreads across the world as antibiotic resistance is a global health problem which knows no boundaries.

Dr H put it in a nutshell when he said:

“A return to a pre-antibiotic era would be a terrible and devastating proposition, but it is a very real possibility if things stay as they are. At the turn of the last century it was quite common for families to lose at least two or three siblings, and perhaps a parent, to what we consider routine infections today. Imagine a world today where wound infections kill people, where operations, like hip and knee replacements, lead to infections which people would succumb to purely because we don’t have sufficient antibiotics to treat routine secondary complications. Resistance to antibiotics is growing, it’s a very real problem and we shouldn’t be complacent.”