Development of New Drugs is ‘Desperately Needed’

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) is lending its support to Lord O’Neil’s latest review on the global threat of antibiotics resistance and his proposals to reduce prescriptions of antibiotics.

Dr Maureen Baker, Chair of the RCGP, commented, ‘Resistance to antibiotics continues to be a global threat, yet astonishingly, there hasn’t been a new class of antibiotics produced in over 25 years.

‘We agree with Lord O’Neill that more investment in the research and development of new drugs to tackle emerging diseases is desperately needed, and if offering incentives to pharmaceutical companies helps facilitate this, then it should be encouraged.

‘Healthcare professionals across the UK are taking warnings about inappropriate antibiotics prescribing very seriously, with recent figures revealing that antibiotics prescribing rates are at their lowest in five years.

‘But it is not only the healthcare sector that needs to play its part in reducing antibiotics prescribing – change needs to take place in agriculture and to tackle the overuse of drugs in farming.

‘GPs also come under enormous pressure from patients to prescribe antibiotics, so we need to do more as a society to make the public realise that prescribing antibiotics is not always the answer to treating minor, self-limiting illness and that the inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics will only serve to do more harm than good.

‘The college has worked with Public Health England to develop the TARGET antibiotics toolkit to support GPs and other prescribing healthcare professionals to prescribe antibiotics appropriately.’