London - Patients should not put pressure on GPs to give them unnecessary antibiotics, according to Britain’s chief medical officer.
Dame Sally Davies says pushy patients are partly to blame for the rise of deadly superbugs that are immune to the drugs.
She warned of possible future deaths from minor cuts, hip replacements and caesarean sections after infections have set in.
‘If a doctor says antibiotics are not appropriate for an illness, we should all listen and not pressurise them into giving us unnecessary drugs,’ she said. ‘Resistance to antibiotics is a real threat.
‘If we do not act now to protect the antibiotics we have, the medicine cabinet will be bare and deaths from infections will rise because of it.’
Her remarks follow a stark warning from Prime Minister David Cameron that Britain faces returning to the ‘dark ages of medicine’ where antibiotics no longer work.
Cameron is vowing urgent action to find new drugs to prevent this ‘unthinkable scenario’.
The crisis has been caused by decades of overuse of antibiotics in human medicine as well as on animals. Bacteria have progressively evolved and an increasing number of strains are resistant to the drugs.
To make matters worse, drug companies have not produced any newer antibiotics in recent years as they are not profitable. Dame Sally said: ‘We have been steadily losing antibiotics over time and yet we are not getting new ones to replace them. The cupboard’s pretty empty.
‘I want parents and patients to listen to the GP when the GP says I don’t believe this is bacterial, I’m not prescribing antibiotics.’
She said it was difficult for doctors to be sure whether a sore throat or cough had been caused by a bacteria or a virus.
Antibiotics do not work against a virus but when put under pressure by patients – or worried parents –GPs will prescribe them as a precaution.
She added: ‘Patients do demand antibiotics inappropriately quite often because they don’t understand that they are not appropriate for all infections. We need to increase understanding.
‘It is very difficult to be certain of the diagnosis in a GP surgery when you have a sick patient with a high temperature in front of you.’
John Cormack, a GP in South Woodham Ferrers, near Chelmsford, Essex, said some patients expected to come away from appointments with drugs as if they were ‘little presents’. He added: ‘There are cases where the message hasn’t come across. People have the attitude where we must not come away empty-handed. Some GPs feel under pressure to prescribe.’
Dr Maureen Baker, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: ‘Antibiotics are brilliant as long as they are properly prescribed and used appropriately.
‘But the public’s reliance on them is worrying and GPs face enormous pressure from patients to prescribe them, even for minor symptoms that can be effectively treated with other medication or that will get better on their own over time.
‘Patients and the public need to be aware of the risks associated with antibiotics. If they are taken frequently and over long periods of time bacteria will adapt to them, eventually making the treatment ineffective and weakening your immune system.’
Cameron recently announced he had launched a review to encourage the development of new antibiotics.
He said: ‘If we fail to act, we are looking at an almost unthinkable scenario where antibiotics no longer work and we are cast back into the dark ages of medicine where treatable infections and injuries will kill once again.’
Jim O’Neill, former chief economist at Goldman Sachs, will lead an international group of experts aiming to spur drug development. - Daily Mail