Keeping medicines effective: Resisting resistance

An international campaign by the World Health Organization aims to combat antimicrobial resistance, which has reached a critical level that may undermine the medical advances of the past 50 years.

Editorial. Oct. 15, 2001.

There is little need for additional evidence attesting to the fact that medicine -- and disease -- know no geographic boundaries. Nevertheless, the recent announcement by the World Health Organization of an international campaign to combat and contain antimicrobial resistance provides a striking reminder of the complexities that are now a part of the global health care picture.

Half a century ago, antibiotics and other drugs were medicine's "magic bullet," promising to control or eradicate many of the diseases that had plagued previous generations. Today, WHO is warning that antimicrobial resistance has reached a critical level that may undermine the advances of the past 50 years. Tuberculosis is one example; in several countries, strains of tuberculosis have become resistant to two of the drugs used against it. Some commonly used antimalarial drugs, WHO warns, now are virtually useless because the parasite has acquired resistance.

Recent generations of physicians around the world have relied on antibiotics to address many problems. Now, however, new strains of drug-resistant organisms are afflicting and endangering patients. There are fears that conditions may parallel those in the early part of the 20th century, when untreatable infections were a major cause of death. [...]