A new report published by the CSIRO and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering on Tuesday found superbug resistance to medicines is a “looming global health crisis” that needs urgent attention in Australia. Antimicrobial resistance is when microorganisms, such as bacteria or fungi, mutate to protect themselves against the drugs that were designed to target them, such as antibiotics or antifungals. The report found growing resistance among common bugs had the ability to render some critical modern medicines ineffective. The report warned we could enter a “post-antibiotic world” as early as 2050, which could see a dramatic decline in life expectancies, as well as serious impacts to livestock production. Meat could become scarce and dangerous to eat. Previous research from the United Nations also predicted drug-resistant microbes would result in 10 million deaths each year globally by 2050 if immediate action is not taken. “The more we use antibiotics, the faster we lose them,” Dr Branwen Morgan, lead of the Minimising Antimicrobial Resistance Mission at the CSIRO, told Guardian Australia. “In a woman’s lifetime, almost half of all women will have a urinary tract infection,” she said. “We already know that those first-line drugs … the ones that you’re usually given first off, aren’t working." The report said the solution wasn’t as simple as making new drugs, because the process can be slow, expensive and stalled by red tape. But better community understanding of microbial resistance as well as emerging technologies could help — for example microbe detection and neutralisation built into sewerage systems to eliminate pathogens before they wash into our waterways. It also said that, as the planet warms, microbes breed and spread faster around the world, and more extreme weather, like flooding, can spread them even further.
