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London: Australia is to be invited to join a global, multibillion-dollar fight against superbugs which are predicted to kill more people than cancer if left unchecked.
The call will come from the UK where Britain's Treasury secretary Jim O'Neill released the results of an 18-month review into antimicrobial resistance, warning that superbugs will kill 10 million people a year by 2050 – more than cancer kills today.
Doctors, and patients, needed to "stop treating antibiotics like sweets".Â
Lord O'Neill
It prompted Britain's chancellor, George Osborne, to call on finance ministers from around the world to agree on a common approach to fighting the threat of superbugs – antibiotics-resistant bacteria. It could include big new taxes on any pharmaceutical companies who don't work to find new antibiotics.
An 18-month review into antimicrobial resistance warns that superbugs will kill more people than cancer kills if left unchecked. Photo: Jamie Smetkowski
Lord O'Neill, an economist, said the G20 meeting this September in China would see serious efforts to gather a global consensus on the issue.
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"[Mr Osborne] is going to lead focus on this among the G7 and G20 finance ministers," he said. "We need that… We need to take it out of the health world and into the finance and business worlds.
"When something gets on the G7 or G20 agenda it doesn't get off until something has happened."
Doctors and patients should avoid using antibiotics for minor ailments. Photo: File
In a statement released with the review, Mr Osborne said it "provides a stark warning that unless we take global action, antimicrobial resistance will become a greater threat to mankind than cancer currently is.
"The economic cost of failing to act is too great to contemplate, so I am calling on other finance ministers to come together this year and, working with industry leaders and medical experts, agree a common approach."
Superbugs had killed one million people in the time it took to put together the review, Lord O'Neill said – and "some of the things that would worry you are already happening quicker than we thought".
Resistant Staphylococcus bacteria. Photo: Science Photo Library
For example, there were growing signs that bacteria could resist colistin, the "last-resort" antibiotic that doctors use when nothing else works.
Colistin-resistant E.Coli was identified in China in a paper published late last last year, and since then the gene has been detected in at least 19 countries.
But very little was happening in terms of finding a solution, Lord O'Neill said.
Report warns antibiotics are not lollies. Photo: Michel O'Sullivan
Against the potential US$100 trillion ($138 trillion) cost of healthcare caused by spreading superbugs, he and his team had proposed a global, US$40 billion program to protect the remaining effective antibiotics, and to discover new ones.
The most effective work would be to reduce the demand for antibiotics, Lord O'Neill said. This was the only way to "change the game permanently".
Doctors, and patients, needed to "stop treating antibiotics like sweets". Instead he said doctors should be encouraged to use diagnostic tests to first prove that a patient genuinely needed an antibiotic, before prescribing it.
There was an urgent need to "get them out of their comfort zone", he said.
Equally importantly, there should be a global agreement to dramatically reduce the amount of antibiotics used in agriculture by 2018.
And there should be an outright ban on the use in agriculture of the specific antibiotics that are vital to human health – for example, colistin.
On the supply side, Lord O'Neill said there was urgent need to counter a legacy of decades of under-investment by the pharmaceutical industry on the development of new antibiotics.
He backed a "global innovation fund" – established by the UK and China last year during President Xi Jinping's visit to Britain.
The fund would pay lump-sum rewards of up to US$1.5 billion for the successful development of new antibiotics.
Ideally, the fund would pay US$25 billion over the next decade for 15 new effective antibiotics.
Lord O'Neill said the fund could be generated from a "pay or play" tax on the pharmaceutical industry.
Those companies trying to make new antibiotics would be exempt or get a refund, he said.
However he said the fund could also be built in other ways, such as taxes or international finance.
World Health Organisation director-general Dr Margaret Chan welcomed the review, saying it tackled the "burning need to find incentives that can get new products into the pipeline".
Dr Eric Goosby, an international expert on tuberculosis, said there would be more than 2.5 million deaths a year from drug-resistant strains of the disease by 2050.
"This is unacceptable," he said. "We urgently need new drugs and better diagnostics, which would significantly save lives and prevent countless people from suffering needlessly."
The report also found support from the pharmaceutical industry.
In January at the World Economic Forum in Davos a group of 85 companies and nine industry associations signed a pledge to increase investment on research into new antibiotics and vaccines.
In a statement in response to the review, GSK chief executive Sir Andrew Witty said it was a "helpful step" and government and industry needed to work together to "develop these ideas into practical steps that encourage and reward further research".
The head of French drug company Sanofi also praised the report for offering "tangible ways forward".