Bacteria love the Credit Crunch

You're probably sick of economics.  You can't go anywhere without being reminded that we're headed for a financial apocalypse; and that was after everyone was concerned about being able to afford the mortgage or petrol; generally it's a gloomy time for anyone when they think about money.

But I can hear bacteria chuckling away, rubbing their little pili together gleefully.  Our current economic downturn could cause major health issues from resistant bacterial infections.

Why?  Well two reasons - Firstly the money that is being pumped by the government into promising everyone that there's no way anyone can lose any money at this time has to be recouped somehow.  More than likely it's either borrowed from rich people and foreign countries (which require interest and repayment on those loans), it's scrimped from other national expenditure or it's taken from the public in the form of increased taxation.  The latter, no-one's in the mood for right now.  The first two could quite possibly mean that people like me, who are working to improve antibiotic prescribing, get the elbow.

Healthcare is a complicated business to get right.  You need systems to ensure that the right patient gets the right drug.  It's important that pharmacists and other healthcare workers who provide an important role, in terms of patient safety, therapeutic quality and pharmaceutical economy, aren't seen as an optional extra which cannot be afforded during this dry patch.

Which bring me onto the second problem - we rely for new antibiotics on big pharmaceutical industries, whose share price is also falling now that the panic has spread beyond the financial sector.  Antibiotic resistance is an inevitable evolutionary process, so we need new antibiotics to be developed to replace the ones we use today.  A number of factors have hindered the development of new antibiotics, not least the increasing expense of bringing a drug to market.  With everyone tightening their belts, we will probably see less R&D spend on an area less lucrative than the cancer and cardiovascular drugs that are being brought out more often than antibiotics.

Like other issues in healthcare, antibiotic resistance doesn't go away if and when economies collapse.  It's important that our tools to manage these issues don't go away either.